The investigation this week by Britain's The Guardian newspaper revealed an alleged extortion operation led by then-Mossad head Yossi Cohen against then-International Criminal Court prosecutor Fatou Bensouda. About two years ago, Haaretz was about to reveal the affair, but an Israeli security official blocked publication. Now the affair has been exposed at a difficult time for Israel.

The timing couldn't be worse. It is occurring in the midst of a political tsunami and a week after Karim Khan, the ICC prosecutor who replaced Bensouda, sought arrest warrants against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.

One of the investigation's key findings would have been known to readers of Haaretz a long time ago if Israel was the democratic state it claims to be.

The first part of the two-part exposé published by the British newspaper, which was conducted in cooperation with journalists from the Israeli-Palestinian investigative sites +972 Magazine and Local Call, focuses on an operation led by Cohen to disrupt an earlier investigation against Israel at the ICC in The Hague, while attempting to threaten and intimidate its former prosecutor, Bensouda.

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Public Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda at the International Criminal Court in the Hague, August 28, 2017. Credit: Bas Czerwinski/Pool via REUTERS

The second part of the exposé provides evidence of an operation to hack and digitally intercept correspondence between Palestinians who were passing information to the court and its staff. This operation was led, according to the investigation, by the Shin Bet and Military Intelligence.

Israel officially denies the claims. The Prime Minister's Office told The Guardian that the allegations were "false and unfounded" and "meant to hurt the State of Israel." However, Israeli officials not only confirmed the main finding in the first part of the investigation, which was learned by Haaretz back in 2022, but also that Israeli government officials had used emergency powers to prevent the story from being published at the time.

According to the Guardian report, Cohen, as head of the Mossad, personally contacted Bensouda several times between 2017 and 2020, and relayed threatening messages to her if she moved ahead with an investigation against Israel. It also reported that Israel used the transcripts of tapes in which Bensouda's husband, Philip, was engaged in some embarrassing conversations, in order to influence her and disrupt the proceedings.

It is possible that this part of the exposé relates to tapes held by the Israeli lawyer Mordechai Tzivin, who indeed did keep recordings of conversations with Philip Bensouda, as reported in TheMarker in December.

It was also reported that Joseph Kabila, the former president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, was allegedly recruited as an agent for the extortion operation against the prosecutor. Among other things, the investigation said a meeting between Kabila and Bensouda in New York served to create an "ambush" for a surprise meeting between Cohen and Bensouda, in which a threatening message was conveyed.

In May 2022, Haaretz had hoped to publish this exact headline: that Israel acted to extort the prosecutor, through the Mossad, as part of an operation directed and personally lead by Cohen.

During the course of an investigation that lasted several months, Haaretz searched for an answer to the question of what the former head of the Mossad was seeking in three visits to the Congo in 2019, accompanied by billionaire Dan Gertler, who was also involved in the dubious operation, according to sources who spoke with Haaretz. Gertler even made his private plane available to fly Cohen to the African country.

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Israeli billionaire Dan Gertler.Credit: Simon Dawson / Bloomberg

The answer, according to several sources, was this: Gertler and Cohen traveled to meet Kabila as part of an operation whose goal was to recruit or extort the ICC prosecutor as she moved against Israel.

At the beginning of 2022, I attempted to contact the former prosecutor through a third party who knew her. Bensouda never responded to the approach, but days after the attempt, when I wanted to publish the story, my phone rang and on the other end of the line was the voice of a senior security official. "Can you come to see me tomorrow?" he asked.

At the entrance to the senior official's office, I was asked to deposit my mobile phone to prevent me from recording the conversation. In the room, another senior official from a different security agency was waiting for me. The conversation began with the words, "We understand you know about the prosecutor."

It was a polite conversation, a polite threat. The tone was calm, the content much less so. I was explained that if I publish the story, I would suffer the consequences and get to know the interrogation rooms of the Israeli security authorities from the inside. I argued against the use of security powers to prevent the publication of information whose harm is not security-related but rather reputational in nature, but to no avail.

In the end, it was made clear to me that even sharing the information "with my friends abroad," referring to foreign media outlets, would lead to the same results.

In May 2022, Haaretz reported on the highlights of Cohen's Congo trips, including the entanglements of the former Mossad head with the authorities there and the circumstances of his expulsion from the country. The fact that the trips were part of an operation to extort or recruit the prosecutor and disrupt the proceedings in The Hague was omitted.

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ICC prosecutor Karim Khan, last month.Credit: Leonardo Fernandez Viloria/Reuters

Two years later, the government's gagging effort has turned out to be a dual folly. Instead of being exposed in an Israeli newspaper, the investigation has now appeared in a newspaper with global circulation. Instead of contending with the story during peacetime, it must now deal with it in the midst of the war.

The timing, it appears, couldn't be worse, occurring in the midst of a political tsunami and a week after current ICC prosecutor Khan, who succeeded Bensouda, is seeking another order against Netanyahu and Gallant on charges they violated the laws of war in Gaza. All that Israel needs is for the prosecutor to add offenses against the administration of justice to his list of allegations. This may very well happen.

On behalf of Gertler, it was stated: "What is stated in your request is not true. The report cited is part of a campaign of persecution that you have been conducting for years against Mr. Gertler, for which lawsuits have been filed. Mr. Gertler reserves the right to file another lawsuit in this matter."

Disclosure: Gertler is suing Haaretz for defamation.

original url: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-05-30/ty-article/.premium/how-israel-nixed-haaretzs-report-into-alleged-mossad-extortion-of-hague-prosecutor/0000018f-c608-d801-a3ef-ff08cf810000

For months, Palestinian civilians were told to evacuate their homes and head to Rafah, a tiny Southern city designated a “safe zone” by Israel, while Israel conducted an aggressive military campaign throughout the rest of Gaza. Israel’s effort to root out members of Hamas in the wake of its Oct. 7 attack has come at a staggering cost: 36,000 dead and counting, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. 

In recent months, more than a million Palestinians, including 600,000 children, were pushed by Israel into makeshift shelters in the so-called “safe zone” in Southern Gaza. But on Sunday, and again on Tuesday, Israel conducted airstrikes in and around Rafah where internally-displaced Palestinians were sheltering, sparking a blaze that engulfed multiple tents. 

The Israeli military said two senior Hamas leaders were among the 45 individuals killed in Sunday’s strike. Speaking to the Israeli Parliament on Monday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the fire and civilian casualties a “tragic mishap.”

James Elder is a spokesman for the United Nations Children’s Fund who has spent months trying to raise awareness about the dire conditions for children and families across Gaza. “They are physically spent, they’re psychologically exhausted, their coping capacity has been smashed, they are in some sort of overdrive in terms of ‘How do I get through this?’ And then, there’s a direct bombardment that turns into this inferno and, I mean, literally: It is hell on Earth,” says Elder. 

Karin Huster is a French-American trauma nurse and medical coordinator for Doctors Without Borders in Gaza, which has been operating on the western side of Rafah since May 14. In a voice note shared with Rolling Stone, she described the situation at the Tal Al-Sultan Trauma Stabilization Point on Sunday after the first airstrike. 

“We received, over the course of the night, over 180 patients, which we were able to stabilize and refer to the open field hospitals in the neighborhood,” Huster said. “Very, very sadly we also received 28 patients that were dead on arrival. Many of the bodies were burned beyond recognition.”

On Monday, Huster said, “military activities continued to intensify” to the extent that they were forced to close the triage unit and transfer all patients to nearby field hospitals. 

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who came to Rafah to escape Israel’s bombing campaign are now fleeing as it has become clear it is not the “safe zone” that was promised.

“A safe zone has two obligations,” says Elder.  “The occupying force, Israel, has a legal obligation to ensure safety — it sounds obvious, but a ‘safe zone’ can’t be bombed — and a safe zone also has to have the things that sustain life: protection, water, food, medicine. These areas [in and around Rafah] have none of that. There has been no attempt whatsoever.”

Since Israel began its attacks in and around Rafah, many of the 1.3 million Palestinians who had been sheltering there are confronting the reality that there is nowhere left to go. The border with Egypt, to the South, is closed and, to the North, where there were once cities, there are only heaps of rubble. 

Huster describes people moving by the thousands along a beach road out of Western Rafah in recent days: “Mayhem might be a strong word, but it is completely chaotic.”

“Where are people going to go? They are moving to Khan Yunis and Dier al-Balah, which are places that have been destroyed. They have no infrastructure that is functioning, there is no running water, there is no electricity. People are going to put their tents or their plastic sheeting  on rubble.”

Many are in Al-Mawasi, an IDF-designated humanitarian zone west of Rafah. “It’s just sand,” Elder says. “It’s utterly unlivable.” 

Some are going further West, to the beach itself. “The tents are all the way to the edge of the water. This is not going to be sustainable. Their tents will be washed away; there is no way this is survivable. It’s insane,” Huster says. “There are flies, there are mosquitoes. It’s just going to be terrible from a hygiene perspective — imagine the beach packed, jam-packed, with plastic sheeting… very very few toilets, forget about the showers.” (Before the airstrikes that caused refugees to flee Rafah, there was approximately one toilet for every 850 people, and one shower for every 3,600 people, according to UNICEF.) 

Israel’s decision to strike the area came just days after the International Court of Justice ordered the country to halt its offensive in Rafah. U.S. President Joe Biden had issued a similar warning to Israel earlier this month, telling CNN: “I made it clear that if they go into Rafah… I’m not supplying the weapons.” (CNN has reported the munition dropped on the refugee camp was American-made.) 

But on Tuesday, speaking from the White House on Tuesday, Biden National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby insisted that Israel’s airstrikes did not violate Biden’s ultimatum. 

“We have not seen them go in, with large units, large numbers of troops, in columns and formations, in some sort of coordinated maneuver against multiple targets on the ground. That is a major ground operation, and we have not seen that,” Kirby said on Tuesday. (Kirby added that the U.S. has also killed civilians in airstrikes in Iraq and Afghanistan.)

At the same press conference, Kirby defended the Rafah crossing closure, saying it was done “to shut off the revenue to Hamas that comes across that crossing.” 

Humanitarian workers say that the border closure is hobbling their efforts to provide medical care and other critical aid to displaced Palestinians. (A floating pier built by the US military to deliver aid to Gaza, meanwhile, was badly damaged by heavy seas this week; officials say it will take at least a week to repair.)

“Medical equipment, medications, we haven’t been able to get. It’s been the same issue with fuel,” Huster says. “It’s been super challenging… And soon it will be impossible for us to work.” 

One nearby hospital, Huster says, lost electricity for hours after it ran out of fuel, forcing medical providers to manually ventilate patients with an inflatable bag. “It’s super tiring for somebody to do. If it’s a kid, it’s easy, but if it’s an adult, it’s more difficult,” Huster says. “It’s just not sustainable.”

Elder raises similar concerns. “The crossing point is where the vast majority of water comes in, of medicines, of highly nutritious food for an unprecedented malnutrition crisis among children. We have been working day in day out to prevent famine, or prevent this nutritional crisis from spreading, and now we are in a situation where not just food, but highly nutritious food for the most severely malnourished children, that’s restricted — everything is restricted. And that’s at an aid crossing for humanitarian supplies that is checked by Israel thoroughly so they know exactly what goes through there. That crossing has been closed.”

Despite its devastating toll — on civilians, aid workers, and members of the press (107 journalists and media workers have been killed since Oct. 7) — the material impact of Israel’s campaign against Hamas has been limited: U.S. intelligence, according to a recent report in Politico, says only 30 to 35 percent of Hamas’ fighters have been killed in the conflict, and more than two-thirds of the militant group’s underground tunnels remain intact.

Huster has spent much of her career in conflict zones; the difference between those experiences and and this one, she says, is that here, the government that is dropping “bombs on Rafah and, sadly, killing so many civilians, is a country with one of the most sophisticated armies in the world — and it has been able to do what it is doing with very little actual consequences from the rest of the world.”

It’s devastating work, but, Huster says, “I know that the day I die, I will be able to sleep because I will have tried to do something.”

The conspiracy theory motivating the ban on a chinese company owning tik tok:

FBI Director Christopher Wray has also publicly testified about his concerns about the app, including during an appearance last week at a Senate hearing on worldwide threats to U.S. security. In that testimony, Wray told members of the Senate Intelligence Committee that the Chinese government could use the app to control software on millions of devices, among other concerns.

"We're not sure that we would see many of the outward signs of it happening if it was happening," Wray said.

While the FBI only has a havanah syndrome-type vague sense of dis-ease, politicians know exactly what there is to be afraid of: having to listen to the voices of their constituents before doing what they are going to do anyway.

[Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis] says the lobbying campaign that TikTok launched — with push notices using location information to connect users by phone to their member of Congress — proves why the bill is needed.

"You had member offices being deluged with calls, you know, teenagers crying and one threatening suicide and one impersonating one of my colleague's sons," he said. "That, to me, demonstrates how the platform could be weaponized in the future."

Congratulations to Gen Z for overcoming Millennial anxieties. !

Also, I haven't seen any coverage of it but did they quietly create the GDPR? If this is generally applicable to all apps, not only owned by adversary countriess or whatever, it could be huge:

It also creates a system for users to download their own data and switch to an alternate platform.