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Revealed: Israeli SPY Chief Threatened ICC Prosecutor Over WAR Crimes Inquiry

Digging Dirt On How Netanyahu Used Mossad To Threaten ICC

Spying, Hacking and Intimidation: Israels’ Nine-Year War’ on The ICC Exposed

The Guardian 30 MAY 2024






Netanyahu has taken a close interest in the intelligence operations against the ICC and its chief prosecutor, Karim Khan.

Investigation reveals how intelligence agencies tried to derail war crimes prosecution, with Netanyahu obsessed with intercepts





Karim Khan. Surveillance was ongoing in recent months providing Netanyahu with advance knowledge of Khans intentions.


When the chief prosecutor of the international criminal court (ICC) announced he was seeking arrest warrants against Israeli and Hamas leaders, he issued a cryptic warning: “I insist that all attempts to impede, intimidate or improperly influence the officials of this court must cease immediately.”

Karim Khan did not provide specific details of attempts to interfere in the ICC’s work, but he noted a clause in the court’s foundational treaty that made any such interference a criminal offence. If the conduct continued, he added, “my office will not hesitate to act”.

The prosecutor did not say who had attempted to intervene in the administration of justice, or how exactly they had done so.

Now, an investigation by the Guardian and the Israeli-based magazines +972 and Local Call can reveal how Israel has run an almost decade-long secret “war” against the court. The country deployed its intelligence agencies to surveil, hack, pressure, smear and allegedly threaten senior ICC staff in an effort to derail the court’s inquiries.

Israeli intelligence captured the communications of numerous ICC officials, including Khan and his predecessor as prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, intercepting phone calls, messages, emails and documents.

The surveillance was ongoing in recent months, providing Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, with advance knowledge of the prosecutor’s intentions. A recent intercepted communication suggested that Khan wanted to issue arrest warrants against Israelis but was under “tremendous pressure from the United States”, according to a source familiar with its contents.

Bensouda, who as chief prosecutor opened the ICC’s investigation in 2021, paving the way for last week’s announcement, was also spied on and allegedly threatened.


Netanyahu has taken a close interest in the intelligence operations against the ICC, and was described by one intelligence source as being “obsessed” with intercepts about the case.

Overseen by his national security advisers, the efforts involved the domestic spy agency, the Shin Bet, as well as the military’s intelligence directorate, Aman, and cyber-intelligence division, Unit 8200.

Intelligence gleaned from intercepts was, sources said, disseminated to government ministries of justice, foreign affairs and strategic affairs.

A covert operation against Bensouda, revealed on Tuesday by the Guardian, was run personally by Netanyahu’s close ally Yossi Cohen, who was at the time the director of Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, the Mossad. At one stage, the spy chief even enlisted the help of the then president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Joseph Kabila.



Details of Israel’s nine-year campaign to thwart the ICC’s inquiry have been uncovered by the Guardian, an Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and Local Call, a Hebrew-language outlet.

The joint investigation draws on interviews with more than two dozen current and former Israeli intelligence officers and government officials, senior ICC figures, diplomats and lawyers familiar with the ICC case and Israel’s efforts to undermine it.


Contacted by the Guardian, a spokesperson for the ICC said it was aware of “proactive intelligence-gathering activities being undertaken by a number of national agencies hostile towards the court”. They said the ICC was continually implementing countermeasures against such activity, and that “none of the recent attacks against it by national intelligence agencies” had penetrated the court’s core evidence holdings, which had remained secure.


A spokesperson for Israel’s prime minister’s office said: “The questions forwarded to us are replete with many false and unfounded allegations meant to hurt the state of Israel.” A military spokesperson added: “The IDF [Israel Defense Forces] did not and does not conduct surveillance or other intelligence operations against the ICC.”

Since it was established in 2002, the ICC has served as a permanent court of last resort for the prosecution of individuals accused of some of the world’s worst atrocities. It has charged the former Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir, the late Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi and most recently, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.

Khan’s decision to seek warrants against Netanyahu and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, along with Hamas leaders implicated in the 7 October attack, marks the first time an ICC prosecutor has sought arrest warrants against the leader of a close western ally.

But the ICC case has been a decade in the making, inching forward amid rising alarm among Israeli officials at the possibility of arrest warrants, which would prevent those accused from travelling to any of the court’s 124 member states for fear of arrest.

It is this spectre of prosecutions in The Hague that one former Israeli intelligence official said had led the “entire military and political establishment” to regard the counteroffensive against the ICC “as a war that had to be waged, and one that Israel needed to be defended against. It was described in military terms.”

That “war” commenced in January 2015, when it was confirmed that Palestine would join the court after it was recognised as a state by the UN general assembly. Its accession was condemned by Israeli officials as a form of “diplomatic terrorism”.

One former defence official familiar with Israel’s counter-ICC effort said joining the court had been “perceived as the crossing of a red line” and “perhaps the most aggressive” diplomatic move taken by the Palestinian Authority, which governs the West Bank. “To be recognised as a state in the UN is nice,” they added.

“But the ICC is a mechanism with teeth.”






Mahmoud Abbas (second from left), the president of the Palestinian Authority, after a meeting with Bensouda in The Hague in October 2015




A Hand-Delivered THREAT

For Fatou Bensouda, a respected Gambian lawyer who was elected the ICC’s chief prosecutor in 2012, the accession of Palestine to the court brought with it a momentous decision. Under the Rome statute, the treaty that established the court, the ICC can exercise its jurisdiction only over crimes within member states or by nationals of those states.

Israel, like the US, Russia and China, is not a member. After Palestine’s acceptance as an ICC member, any alleged war crimes – committed by those of any nationality – in occupied Palestinian territories now fell under Bensouda’s jurisdiction.


On 16 January 2015, within weeks of Palestine joining, Bensouda opened a preliminary examination into what in the legalese of the court was called “the situation in Palestine”. The following month, two men who had managed to obtain the prosecutor’s private address turned up at her home in The Hague.

Sources familiar with the incident said the men declined to identify themselves when they arrived, but said they wanted to hand-deliver a letter to Bensouda on behalf of an unknown German woman who wanted to thank her. The envelope contained hundreds of dollars in cash and a note with an Israeli phone number.





Fatou Bensoudas’ caseload also included nine full investigations, including into events in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.


Sources with knowledge of an ICC review into the incident said that while it was not possible to identify the men, or fully establish their motives, it was concluded that Israel was likely to be signalling to the prosecutor that it knew where she lived.


The ICC reported the incident to Dutch authorities and put in place additional security, installing CCTV cameras at her home.







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