Israel has all but officially blocked the Spanish state’s investigation into the alleged hacking of Spanish President Pedro Sánchez’s phone in 2020.
Spain’s National Court announced Monday, July 10th, that the investigation into the phone hacking had been paused, since four requests to the Israeli government for information had gone unanswered.
“This silence clearly shows an absolute lack of legal cooperation on the part of the government of Israel. This leads us to presume that the judicial request in question, which has been sent four times, will never be executed,” José Luis Calama, a judge at Spain’s National Court, said, as reported by local media Monday.
Investigators believe that the spyware Pegasus—a product of the Israeli company NSO that needs the approval of the Israeli government for every sale of the software—was used to hack into Sánchez’s phone between 2020 and 2021 and allegedly steal approximately 3 gigabytes of information. The alleged spying included hacks into the phones of Spain’s ministers of defence, interior, and agriculture.
Calama added that “the very security of the state has been put in jeopardy by the spyware hacks.”
Sánchez was the first Western leader and head of NATO member state to publicly acknowledge suspicions that his phone was hacked by another foreign power. The announcement was made amid a public relations kerfuffle over Citizen’s Lab report that the phones of Catalan separatists had been hacked by the Spanish state in the months and years leading up to the illegal independence referendum in the region in 2017. An EU parliamentary investigation also pointed the finger at Morocco for the phone hack of the Spanish president.
Spanish media suspect that Morocco may be blackmailing Sánchez. Coincidentally, at the same time of the alleged phone hack, the Spanish president reversed decades of Spanish foreign policy regarding the sovereignty of West Sahara, which Morocco has pretensions over, lending his support to Rabat and abandoning support for Spain’s former colony.
For its part, Morocco has drawn increasingly closer to the U.S., which is a close ally of Israel and supports Morocco’s claims on West Sahara, and officially reestablished relations with Israel in 2020.
Additional questions have arisen, too, regarding Sánchez’s change of policy toward this region. The Spanish government has been unable to produce the official communique to Morocco announcing the change of policy. In fact, the change in policy was not initially announced by Spain, but rather by the Moroccan government. The circumstances are now suggesting that Spain never wrote to Rabat but simply ratified the Moroccan position at its behest.
Given the totality of coincidences, it’s easy to wonder if the Israeli state may not be motivated by its allegiance to the U.S., and thus to U.S. ally Morocco, to put up obstacles to an investigation into Morocco.
In any case, Sánchez is appearing more and more like the puppet of Morocco, and a weak international leader for his country, even as he faces re-election on July 23rd.
