Linkerbaan

The US has imposed sanctions on yet another Israeli spyware firm, Intellexa, citing the “threats” that it poses to national security. The move comes in the wake of the ongoing global scandal surrounding Israeli spyware companies, most notably NSO Group, which has been accused of selling espionage technology to some of the world’s most repressive regimes to target journalists, critics and human rights activists. NSO was put on Washington’s blacklist in 2021, again over national security concerns.

Three years on from the global NSO scandal, the proliferation of Israeli spyware continues to pose a menace, as the US Treasury Department announced yesterday the expansion of personal sanctions against officials linked to the offensive cyber-arms firms Cytrox and Intellexa, developers of the Predator spyware software used for mobile phone surveillance.

Investigations by journalists have revealed that Intellexa’s Predator spyware was sold to a Sudanese militia and even to militants in Bangladesh, highlighting the ongoing concerns about the lack of oversight and regulation around Israel’s cyber-surveillance industry. The most high-profile case of espionage involving NSO technology was that of Jamal Khashoggi.

Because it is

Context

Israel proposed giving Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar safe passage out of Gaza in exchange for the group freeing the hostages it holds and giving up control of the strip, a senior official said, even as doubts deepen about the two sides’ ability to reach any cease-fire accord.

“I’m ready to provide safe passage to Sinwar, his family, whoever wants to join him,” Israel hostage envoy Gal Hirsch said in an interview Tuesday in the Bloomberg News Washington bureau. “We want the hostages back. We want demilitarization, de-radicalization of course — a new system that will manage Gaza.”

The Israeli army in December killed three captives in Gaza by mistake and kept this information hidden from the public, local Israeli media said Monday.

The three captives – among the roughly 250 taken by Hamas and other Palestinian groups during the October 7 attack in southern Israel – were killed in an airstrike that allegedly targeted a senior military leader of Hamas in the enclave’s north, Israel’s Channel 12 reported.

The Israeli army acknowledged it had killed the three following the Channel 12 report, however rejected that it had attempted a coverup.

In another incident, a December investigation revealed that Israeli soldiers ignored cries for "help" when they stormed a Gaza building holding three hostages just days before killing them by mistake.

Israeli air strikes on a so-called "humanitarian zone" in southern Gaza's al-Mawasi killed at least 40 people on Tuesday, according to health authorities in the enclave.

The strikes targeted at least 20 tents sheltering displaced Palestinians in the coastal area near the city of Khan Younis.

Eyewitnesses told AFP that at least five rockets fell in the area, with emergency services saying the strikes created craters up to nine metres deep.

Officials in the United States have said that Washington still does not “know with full certainty what transpired” when a US citizen was killed by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank last week, stressing that they were waiting for the findings of an Israeli investigation.

The US on Monday also appeared to reject calls for an independent investigation into the fatal shooting of Aysenur Ezgi Eygi. State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel declined to acknowledge that Eygi was killed by an Israeli soldier, but he called for the process to “play out and for the facts to be gathered”.

He also urged Israel to “quickly and robustly conduct” its probe and make the findings public but confirmed the administration is not planning to independently investigate the killing — as Eygi’s family requested.