New Delhi: Israel’s former Mossad chief Yossi Cohen had reportedly threatened then-chief prosecutor of the Rome-based International Criminal Court (ICC), Fatou Bensouda, during a series of meetings aimed at persuading her to abandon an investigation into alleged war crimes in the occupied Palestinian territories.
The revelations were made in a report published by the UK newspaper The Guardian as part of a joint investigation with Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call, which looks into how Israeli intelligence agencies “ran a covert “war” against the ICC for almost a decade”.
When contacted, there were no comments from either Cohen or Bensouda.
The spokesperson of the Israeli prime minister’s office termed the questions from The Guardian as “replete with many false and unfounded allegations meant to hurt the state of Israel”.
Last week, Bensouda’s successor, Karim Khan, announced that the ICC was seeking arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, defence minister Yoav Gallant and three senior Hamas leaders.
In 2015, Bensouda as ICC prosecutor opened a preliminary investigation to find out if the allegation of crimes by individuals in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem was tenable.
Israel, which does not recognise the ICC, had then feared that its citizens could be prosecuted for their involvement in operations in Palestine.
“Soon after commencing the preliminary examination, Bensouda and her senior prosecutors began to receive warnings that Israeli intelligence was taking a close interest in their work,” wrote The Guardian.
Cohen took over as Mossad director in January 2016 after having served three years as Israel’s national security advisor.
As per the newspaper, the first interaction took place at the 2017 Munich Security Conference, where Cohen introduced himself to Bensouda in a “brief exchange”.
A year later in 2018, the ICC prosecutor was meeting the then-President of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Joseph Kabila, in a Manhattan hotel.
The ICC was conducting a probe into war crimes and crimes against humanity in the armed conflict in the DRC.
“At a certain point, after Bensouda’s staff were asked to leave the room, Cohen entered, according to three sources familiar with the meeting. The surprise appearance, they said, caused alarm to Bensouda and a group of ICC officials travelling with her,” said the report.
The Israeli publication TheMarker and broadcaster Kan 11 had reported a few years ago that the Mossad chief had made a series of “secretive trips” to the DRC in 2019.
After the sudden meeting in New York, Cohen kept calling Bensouda to seek meetings, three sources told the joint investigation.
“According to two people familiar with the situation, at one stage Bensouda asked Cohen how he had obtained her phone number, to which he replied: “Did you forget what I do for a living?”
In those initial encounters, the Mossad chief attempted to charm Bensouda, but over time the tone changed, which “prompted Bensouda to inform a small group of senior ICC officials about his behaviour”.
In December 2019, the ICC prosecutor announced that she had grounds to open a full investigation into the alleged war crimes in the occupied Palestinian territories, but first requested a ruling from the ICC’s pre-trial chamber to confirm whether the court had jurisdiction over Palestine.
Over the next year and till early 2021, the article said that Cohen initiated at least three encounters with Bensouda.
In their last two meetings, Cohen directly raised questions about her security and her family “in a manner that led her to believe he was threatening her”.
Bensouda conveyed to her ICC colleagues that Cohen told her, “You should help us and let us take care of you. You don’t want to be getting into things that could compromise your security or that of your family.”
He also apparently showed copies of covert photographs of Bensouda with her husband taken in Loden.
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He suggested, as the sources told the media outlets, that opening the investigation would be detrimental to her career.
“Four sources familiar with the situation said it was around the same time that Bensouda and other ICC officials discovered that information was circulating among diplomatic channels relating to her husband, who worked as an international affairs consultant … The spy agency obtained a cache of material, including transcripts of an apparent sting operation against her husband.”
The investigative article said that the provenance of the recordings was not clear and there was a possibility that they were fabricated.
“Once in the possession of Israel, however, the material was used by its diplomats in an unsuccessful attempt to undermine the chief prosecutor. But according to multiple sources, Israel failed to convince its allies of the significance of the material,” said The Guardian.
Under the Donald Trump administration, the United States imposed visa restrictions and sanctions on the chief prosecutor.
While it was primarily to retaliate against the ICC’s opening an investigation into war crimes in Afghanistan, the then-US secretary of state Mike Pompeo had also linked it with the Palestine issue.
The US removed its sanctions on ICC officials after Joe Biden’s taking over the White House.
In February 2021, the ICC’s pre-trial chamber confirmed that the court had jurisdiction over the occupied Palestinian territories.
The following month, Bensouda announced the initiation of a criminal investigation, which resulted in Khan seeking arrest warrants last week as a consequence of the renewed urgency due to the latest Gaza War.
The newspaper reported that legal experts and former ICC officials opined that efforts by the Israeli foreign intelligence agency to pressurise Bensouda could amount to offences against the administration of justice under article 70 of the Rome statute.
In a separate report, +972 Magazine published an article about Israel’s intelligence operation to intensely surveil senior ICC and UN officials, which allegedly dates back to 2015.
“According to sources, the covert operation mobilised the highest branches of Israel’s government, the intelligence community, and both the civilian and military legal systems in order to derail the probe,” the article says.
It continues: “The intelligence information obtained via surveillance was passed on to a secret team of top Israeli government lawyers and diplomats, who traveled to The Hague for confidential meetings with ICC officials in an attempt to “feed [the chief prosecutor] information that would make her doubt the basis of her right to be dealing with this question”.”
It also alleged that the intelligence was used by the Israeli military to retroactively open investigations into incidents of interest to the ICC, in an attempt to demonstrate that Israel’s legal system is capable of holding itself accountable.
The magazine reported that the Israeli PM had a direct role in the operations regarding the monitoring of ICC officials. “One source stressed that Netanyahu was “obsessed, obsessed, obsessed” with finding out what materials the ICC was receiving.”
When Khan announced the application of arrest warrants on May 20, he tellingly warned: “I insist that all attempts to impede, intimidate or improperly influence the officials of this court must cease immediately. My office will not hesitate to act pursuant to article 70 of the Rome Statute if such conduct continues.”
