Israel minister to discuss Pegasus on visit to France

JERUSALEM/BUDAPEST: Israeli defence minister Benny Gantz will travel to France this week to discuss spyware sold by Israeli cyber firm NSO Group that was allegedly used to target French President Emmanuel Macron.

Macron’s phone was on a list of targets that were possibly under surveillance by Morocco, which used NSO Group’s Pegasus software, according to France’s Le Monde newspaper. The French leader has called for an investigation.

Gantz will meet French defence minister Florence Parly on Wednesday, an official Israeli statement said.

“Gantz will discuss the crisis in Lebanon and the developing agreement with Iran. He will also update the minister on the topic of NSO,” it said.

Israel’s defence ministry oversees commercial exports of spyware and cyber-surveillance technologies like Pegasus.

A global investigation published last week by 17 media organisations, led by the Parisbased non-profit journalism group Forbidden Stories, said Pegasus had been used in attempted and successful hacks of smartphones belonging to journalists, government officials and human rights activists.

Israel has since set up a senior interministerial team to assess any possible misuse of the spyware.

NSO rejected the reports, saying it was “full of wrong assumptions and uncorroborated theories”.

Gantz’s trip was planned before the NSO affair and was meant to focus on the growing economic crisis in Lebanon, which shares a border with Israel, and on world powers’ efforts to resume a nuclear deal with Iran, Israeli media said.

Israel is concerned a revival of the deal may eventually allow its arch-foe Tehran to acquire atomic weapons. Iran denies seeking the bomb. Attempts to revive the 2015 accord, after then-President Donald Trump abandoned it in 2018, have been slow to make progress.

Hungarians protest over alleged govt spying

Around 1,000 protesters in Hungary’s capital on Monday demanded answers to allegations that the country’s rightwing government used powerful spyware to secretly monitor critical journalists, lawyers and business figures.

“This scandal shows we cannot talk about the rule of law anymore in Hungary,” said Anna Donath, a Hungarian lawmaker in the European Union’s legislature who attended the demonstration.