By David Gonzalez Silent clues to a violent past are buried among the scores of mass graves that dot Chungui district in the mountainous Ayacucho region of Peru. There, above layers of earth that mark geological time, lie relatively new remnants attesting to the massacres carried out by both the Shining Path guerrillas and the military and police forces that hunted them. A soggy, wrinkled skirt. A skull. Fragments of a spinal column. All that remains of the many men, women and children caught in the crossfire of a war they never wanted. When these remains are lifted from their unmarked graves, they bring with them the chance to be identified, to give their survivors an idea of what happened. To give them something they can bury, and mourn. Max Cabello Orcasitas, a Peruvian photojournalist, had been intrigued by the exhumations taking place in the region, which was among the hardest-hit by the political violence 30 years ago. He had read about it in a report by the country’s truth commission that offered an accounting of the crimes and killings that were carried out during these dirty wars. Members of the self-defense committee pose at the end of the carnival in Chungui in 2010.CreditMax Cabello Orcasitas “It struck me as a little-known tragedy,” Mr. Cabello Orcasitas said. “It was like that place in Yugoslavia where there were massacres, Srebrenica. This was like a Peruvian Srebrenica.” There were few exhumations going on when he traveled to the region in 2009, but that worked in his favor, since he wanted to get to know the area’s residents before broaching uncomfortable topics. So he spent his time photographing daily life. “It was important to start that way,” he said. “I had seen previous reports that concentrated just on the exhumations. I wanted to show the people of Chungui as they lived, including their festivals, celebrations and religious ceremonies, because that shows a type of recovery after the trauma. I didn’t want to just go in and say ‘Tell me about your tragedies.’” But it can also show what has not changed, especially in the remote hamlet of Oronquoy, in an area nicknamed the Dog’s Ear, where the military had dragooned some residents into “self-defense” groups that carried out extrajudicial killings. Alberto Sulca excavates an area where he presumes his relatives are buried. Oronqoy, Peru, 2013.Credit Max Cabello Orcasitas There are lingering resentments over these violent acts, especially since many of the people responsible for the massacres have never been tried, or are in the early stages. “There are sectors of the Army that have tried not to deal with this,” he said. “It’s a difficult topic. And I imagine the police and military don’t want to talk about what happened. There is a political strategy to let time pass.” But time has stood still in Oronquoy, which can be reached only after driving and hiking for hours. “Some people said the exhumations opened old wounds,” he said. “But others thought the tragedy could shed light on how abandoned the area had been. Not only had there been massacres, but they continue living without access to roads or hospitals.” If anything, Mr. Cabello Orcasitas said, the impoverished residents of this area are making dual demands. “They want not only justice but economic development,” he said. “These are areas that were and continue to be very poor, with 80 percent of the population living in extreme poverty. They are demanding from the state attention and development.” ____________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 The New York Times

Spectators in the public gallery began singing “I Am Australian,” a well-known anthem, after Australian lawmakers voted to legalize same-sex marriage on Thursday. By PARLIAMENT OF AUSTRALIA VIA STORYFUL on Publish DateDecember 7, 2017. Photo by Michael Masters/Getty Images. Watch in Times Video » Australia’s Parliament voted overwhelmingly to legalize same-sex marriage on Thursday, overcoming years of conservative resistance to enact change that the public had made clear that it wanted. The final approval in the House of Representatives, with just four votes against the bill, came three weeks after a national referendum showed strong public support for gay marriage. The Senate passed the legislation last week. “This belongs to us all,” Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, a longtime supporter of same-sex marriage who had previously failed to get it legalized, said on Thursday. “This is Australia: fair, diverse, loving and filled with respect. For every one of us this is a great day.” After the vote, spectators in the public gallery began singing “I Am Australian,” a well-known anthem. Lawmakers stood and looked up at the gallery, some wiping tears from their eyes. The new law expands on earlier legislation that provided equality to same-sex couples in areas like government benefits, employment and taxes, and it changes the definition of marriage from “the union of a man and a woman” to “the union of two people.” It automatically recognizes same-sex marriages from other countries. Gay rights advocates praised the landmark vote even as they said it was long overdue. In a country where there had been 22 unsuccessful attempts in Parliament to legalize same-sex marriage since 2004, they said, the law should be seen as the triumph of a democracy learning to live up to its values. Celebration at a bar in Sydney after the bill passed. The Australian public voted decisively for legalizing gay marriage in a nonbinding referendum last month. CreditDaniel Munoz/Getty Images “This is a big victory,” said Evan Wolfson, the founder of Freedom to Marry, which led the campaign for marriage equality in the United States. “It is a huge affirmation of the dignity of gay people in yet another country, and that will reverberate in the lives of people across Australia and the world.” A handful of lawmakers tried to add amendments that they said were meant to safeguard religious freedoms for opponents of same-sex marriage, but their efforts failed. Mr. Turnbull noted that nothing in the legislation requires ministers or other celebrants to oversee weddings of gay couples or threatens the charity status of religious groups that oppose same-sex marriage, two concerns the lawmakers had raised. The final debate in the House of Representatives, which lasted four days, featured more than 100 speakers. On the first day, there was a marriage proposal: Tim Wilson, a gay member of Parliament with the center-right Liberal Party, spoke of the struggles he and his partner, Ryan Bolger, had encountered as a couple, before choking up, finding him in the public gallery and asking: “Ryan Patrick Bolger, will you marry me?” The answer came loud and clear — “yes” — as did public congratulations from the deputy speaker, Rob Mitchell. That was followed by hours of emotional speeches, as politicians on the left and right fell into a rare moment of relative consensus and moving closer to public sentiment, which has favored same-sex marriage for years, according to polls. Even former Prime Minister Tony Abbott, a staunch critic of same-sex marriage, seemed to have softened. “When it comes to same-sex marriage, some countries have introduced it via the courts, some via Parliament, and others — Ireland and now Australia — by vote of the people,” Mr. Abbott said. “And that is the best way because it resolves this matter beyond doubt or quibble.” For many lawmakers and gay-rights advocates working behind the scenes, the debate took on the feel of a communal reckoning with Australia’s long history of homophobia. At one point, Adam Bandt, a Greens Party lawmaker from Melbourne, paused for a moment of silence after referring to the “innocent blood” of gay Australians who were hurt during the long battle for marriage equality. Bill Shorten, leader of the opposition Labor Party, asked for forgiveness “for the long delay, for the injustices and the indignities both great and small.” He also paid tribute to a Labor Party colleague, Senator Penny Wong, a gay politician who he said had walked “a lonely road and a hard road” to help change Australia. Passage came just weeks after 61 percent of voters in a nonbinding national referendum, conducted by mail, expressed support for same-sex marriage. Advocates for gay marriage assailed the Turnbull government’s decision to hold the referendum, calling it a delaying tactic intended to appease his party’s far-right faction. “Our very identity has been the subject of public scrutiny and public debate,” Senator Wong said after the referendum results were announced. “Through this campaign, we have seen the best of our country and also the worst.” Warren Entsch, a lawmaker with the governing Liberal Party, celebrating with Linda Burney of the opposition Labor Party after the bill passed. There were only four votes against the legislation.CreditLukas Coch/European Pressphoto Agency At her office in Parliament House this week, Ms. Wong said Mr. Turnbull’s decision to pursue the referendum had unleashed a campaign of fear-mongering and hate that she would struggle to forgive. “It is a hard thing to have others judge whether you deserve to be equal,” she said. “And it is an even harder thing to have your family and your children besmirched by those who want to perpetuate discrimination.” Many other gay Australians said they had been hurt and frustrated by the referendum process. “The conversation around marriage equality was being dominated by those who were against it,” said Tristan Meecham, the artistic director of the performance company All the Queens Men and the founder of the Coming Back Out Ball, meant to encourage older gay Australians not to return to the closet. Left out of the discussion, he added, were issues that go beyond marriage, such as the way older men and women deal with earlier traumas tied to prejudice and gay bashing, or suicide among teenagers dealing with issues of gender and sexuality. “People need to realize that marriage is a certain thing for a certain part of the community, but the real social mission behind all of this is equality,” Mr. Meecham said. “And there is a lot of work that still needs to be done.” Still, he said, he could not deny the sense of validation that the process had delivered. “There’s a breathing process,” he said, “a relief, a cleansing.” In Parliament after the vote, there was mostly jubilation and relief. Hamish Taylor, 22, from Melbourne, walked out of the gallery and embraced his best friend in a bear hug. “I’m absolutely gobsmacked,” he said. “My heart is beating out of my chest. This debate has been in my life ever since I knew I was gay.” Photo Campaigners for same-sex marriage outside Parliament House before the vote on Thursday.CreditLukas Coch/Australian Associated Press, via Reuters Of the result, he said, “It’s alleviated a life of shame and embarrassment of who I am,” adding: “It’s just validated everyone’s love here and around Australia.” In many countries where same-sex marriage is already legal, the tangible effects of institutional acceptance have become more visible, and positive, studies have found. One study published earlier this year, in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, found that reducing societal stigma through marriage legalization had led to a 14 percent reduction in suicide attempts among lesbian, gay and bisexual teenagers. Mr. Wolfson said that in both the United States and Spain, which legalized same-sex marriage in 2005, polls have found support for same-sex marriage growing instead of diminishing, a sign of the laws’ positive effects. “Families are helped and no one is hurt,” he said. “The evidence is overwhelming.” For now, though, Australia is more focused on the immediate, with the first legal same-sex weddings expected in early January. In his chambers the day after proposing to his partner, Mr. Wilson seemed exhausted and relieved. He said that after many false starts, he was thrilled to finally be getting married in his hometown, Melbourne, early next year. “People kept saying go and get married overseas, and we always took a very firm view that we couldn’t do that,” Mr. Wilson said. “We had to get married in our home city.” He predicted a small, private and proud celebration. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 The New York Times

By David Segal If an autopsy could have been performed on Bell Pottinger, Britain’s most audacious public relations firm, the cause of death may have been summarized as “acute embarrassment.” This is ironic because Bell Pottinger always seemed defiantly beyond shame. During its 30 years in the upper echelons of Britain’s spin doctoring game, it sought to polish the image of dictators (Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus), repressive regimes (Bahrain and Egypt, to name two) and celebrities accused of despicable crimes (the Olympic runner Oscar Pistorius after he was charged with murder). But in early 2016, Bell Pottinger signed a client that ultimately buried it in disgrace. The company worked for the Guptas, three brothers from India who built a sprawling, multibillion-dollar corporate empire in South Africa. Ajay, Tony and Atul Gupta had earned fantastic sums leveraging their friendship with President Jacob G. Zuma. By bullying officials and bending regulations to their will, they secured contracts in fields as varied as armaments, mining and railways. They offered ministerial jobs to politicians of their choosing. The Guptas and Mr. Zuma were so intertwined that critics had taken to referring to the “Zupta regime.” As the power of the Guptas and their holding company, Oakbay Investments, gained attention, the family wanted the public relations equivalent of a stun grenade — a distraction that would draw attention away from them and onto their many enemies. So Bell Pottinger was retained, and given an assignment that initially sounded benign enough: grass-roots political activism intended to help poor blacks. By the following year, Bell Pottinger was embroiled in a national maelstrom. In TV reports, editorials and public rallies, it stood accused of setting off racial tensions through a furtive campaign built on Twitter bots, hate-filled websites and speeches. All were pushing a highly toxic narrative, namely that whites in South Africa had seized resources and wealth while they deprived blacks of education and jobs. The message was popularized with an incendiary phrase, “white monopoly capital.” How Bell Pottinger went bankrupt is a tale of corporate skulduggery that seems lifted from “House of Cards,” the P.R. edition. During the Gupta disaster, a vicious boardroom struggle unfolded, one that pitted a co-founder, Tim Bell, against James Henderson, 53, who ran the firm in the years before it went under. Their conflict centered on the perennials of business potboilers, namely power and money. The story is also an inside look at the current, tormented state of politics in South Africa. Allegations of Gupta-related corruption surfaced gradually over the years, as officials and the media described how this once unknown family was ransacking South Africa and its institutions. President Zuma has since been swept up by investigations into the brothers amid an outcry that he let them hijack the government in a textbook example of “state capture.” With the economy sputtering, Mr. Zuma’s own party has called for his ouster. The scandal has engulfed the nation. Mr. Zuma is a member of the African National Congress, the party of Nelson Mandela and post-apartheid comity. His alliance with the Guptas, and their exploitation of racial animosity, has underscored just how far the party has wandered from its roots after winning its first election in 1994. Though the only corporate fatality, Bell Pottinger is just one of the companies tainted by the Guptas. A small coterie of multinationals is now under investigation by South African authorities, including local units of three companies, McKinsey, KPMG and the software giant SAP. The Guptas’ most devastating legacy is the harm they did to the cause of economic reform. With so many blacks in South Africa mired in poverty, the topic is urgent, but discussion about it has been debased by its association with a notorious and self-serving P.R. campaign. In the midst of that campaign, racial tensions rose to levels that had not been felt since apartheid. “White monopoly capital,” a phrase that for years had been confined to left-wing academic circles, was suddenly unavoidable. A political group with reported links to the Guptas warned of a coming civil war. When Bell Pottinger’s role became public, protesters rallied against the company, both in South Africa and outside the firm’s London office. A subsequent investigation by the Public Relations and Communications Association, a trade group in Britain, ended with the ejection of Bell Pottinger. “In my years of running the P.R.C.A., I have never seen anything worse, never seen anything equal to it,” Francis Ingham, director general of the trade association, said in an interview. “The work was on a completely new scale of awfulness. Bell Pottinger may have set back race relations in South Africa by as much as 10 years.” Within days of the firm’s removal from the trade association, clients were fleeing. By the end of September, all 250 employees were laid off and Bell Pottinger was finished. A Unique Client List London is now home to a cluster of P.R. firms catering to foreign governments, raising worries that the city has become “the global capital of reputation laundering,” as The Evening Standard put it a few years ago. Bell Pottinger established the template of this lucrative niche. It was largely the brainchild of Tim Bell, who had earned his reputation, along with a knighthood, helping Margaret Thatcher win three elections. He came to fame with the “Labour isn’t working” ads that helped the Conservative Party gain control of Parliament in the 1979 general election. Colleagues actually coined the phrase, and he talked Mrs. Thatcher into adopting it. “There were many conversations in which she shouted at me and told me I was an idiot,” he recalled. “I just had to stand my ground and say, ‘I know what I’m doing.’” Now 77, Mr. Bell appears to have stepped directly out of an Evelyn Waugh novel with everything but a smoking jacket. Gray haired with an owlish pair of black glasses, he speaks with jaunty indifference and ingratiating candor, a combination that always made the tsk-tskers who disapproved of his client list sound unworldly and naïve. With the company co-founder, Piers Pottinger, Mr. Bell conceived a “go anywhere, do anything” ethos, as they called it. When the pair started working together in the mid-80s, Mr. Bell was sought after by political leaders and corporations who wanted some of the communications magic he had provided to Mrs. Thatcher. Bell Pottinger quickly had hundreds of clients, a few of them infamous. Mr. Bell attributes his ability to work with virtually anyone to innate optimism. “I see the good in people,” he said. This included Chile’s former dictator Augusto Pinochet. Mr. Pinochet was placed under house arrest in Britain in 1998 as part of an effort to deport him to Spain, where he had been indicted on a charge of torturing Spanish citizens. After two years of legal and political wrangling, Mr. Bell and his allies prevailed when Mr. Pinochet was authorized to freely return to Chile. Bell Pottinger was hardly the only British outfit working for rogues and despots, as well as publicly traded companies, nor was it the largest or most profitable. But it had a buccaneering spirit that made it the firm of choice for a wide variety of missions. During the war in Iraq, Bell Pottinger had a contract with the Pentagon to produce propaganda for the United States military. This included scripts in Arabic for a soap opera that aired in the country, said Mr. Bell. " data-mediaviewer-credit="Dumitru Doru/European Pressphoto Agency" itemprop="url" itemid="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/02/03/business/00bellpottinger-9/00bellpottinger-9-master675.jpg" style="height: auto; max-width: 100%; display: block; width: 570px;"> When the company’s client list did not generate news, its methods did. In 2011, it was caught boasting about its skills in the dark arts of search engine manipulation to people it thought were potential clients. In fact, they were undercover members of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a nonprofit organization that works with a variety of media. Posing as executives from the made-up Azimov Group, these “representatives” said the company had ties to the Uzbekistan regime, which has been criticized for repression and for using forced child labor during its cotton harvest. The Azimov executives said they worried about blowback. Fret not, said Tim Collins, a Bell Pottinger managing director, per transcripts published by The Independent, a British newspaper. After the company applied its tech wizardry, “You get to the point where even if they type in ‘Uzbek child labour’ or ‘Uzbek human rights violation,’ some of the first results that come up are sites talking about what you guys are doing to address and improve that, not just the critical voices saying how terrible this all is.” Mr. Bell never challenged the transcripts, but he denounced the sting at the time as an “unethical, underhand deception to manufacture a story where none exists.” Beginning of the End Bell Pottinger’s slide into oblivion began with a visit to the Guptas in January 2016. Mr. Bell, who had worked in South Africa for years, said he had no idea what the brothers wanted, but he and several colleagues flew to Johannesburg to find out. “We went to this bloody great mansion, which seemed to be their headquarters,” Mr. Bell recalled. “Great big room, huge sofas all over the place. Servants. Appalling, all of it.” The family already had a fortune, Tony Gupta told the small entourage. Now, he and his brothers wanted to help poor blacks. To that end, they wanted a P.R. campaign that pushed the idea of economic emancipation. “So we went back to London and wrote a strategy,” said Mr. Bell. “Town hall meetings, marching in the street, that kind of thing. Draw attention to the economic imbalance, then tell people they should protest and demand change.” The company drafted a two-page proposal, a copy of which was reviewed by The New York Times. Among its recommendations was “a non-party political narrative around the existence of economic apartheid” that Bell Pottinger would package “into speeches, news releases, website content, videos/broadcast content, slogans and other material required.” Soon, the Guptas said that their company needed communications help, too. Most South Africans, the Guptas maintained, had an inflated notion of how much of the family’s revenue came from government contracts, which harmed their interests, several Bell Pottinger employees recalled. The corporate campaign was the first sign that altruism had little to do with the £100,000 a month that Bell Pottinger would earn during what was initially a three-month project. The second was the anger of the company’s other South Africa clients when they learned of the arrangement. The billionaire Johann Rupert was aghast to suddenly find himself one of the most prominent examples of “white monopoly capital.” He texted Mr. Bell and asked how his P.R. firm could also be working for a family that was bashing him. Mr. Bell, by his own account, quickly lost enthusiasm for the Gupta project. “It was altogether smelly,” he said of the racial element of the work. But he quickly added that ethics were not the issue. If enough South African clients quit Bell Pottinger, he reasoned, the losses would outweigh the Guptas’s checks. “I was saying it’s not a commercially sensible thing to do.” But by the end of March, only one client — the banking and asset management company Investec — had severed ties with the P.R. firm. After that, Bell Pottinger tried to find middle ground by signing a new contract with the Guptas, this time with a codicil literally called an anti-embarrassment clause. It allowed the firm to terminate the account “without notice” if the brothers brought discredit to the business. Mr. Bell said he soon resolved to quit the company because he felt undermined and undervalued by Mr. Henderson. “He made my life a misery from start to finish,” said Mr. Bell, speaking one recent afternoon in the living room of his home near London’s Sloane Square. After negotiating a £3.5 million exit package, Mr. Bell resigned in August 2016. For his part, Mr. Henderson declined in a recent interview to indulge in the put-downs that come so easily to his antagonist. Seated at a conference table in temporary offices in Mayfair, where he is starting a new P.R. firm, he said Bell Pottinger’s dissolution was too recent to discuss. “I have huge empathy for all those impacted,” he said, “and believe now is not the appropriate time to go into details.” Inflaming Tensions The P.R. campaign in South Africa, which started in 2016, was intended to raise the temperature of race relations. And it worked. More than 100 fake Twitter accounts were created, all of them retweeting content from other Twitter accounts with names like @economycapture, according to media reports. Popular hashtags included #WhiteMonopolyCapital and #RespectGuptas. The campaign involved some 220,000 tweets. There were also attack website with names like WMC Leaks and WMC Scams. Another part of this ecosystem were mainstream media outlets owned by the Guptas, like ANN7, a 24-hour news channel, and The New Age, a daily newspaper. As the campaign spread, leaders at groups like the A.N.C. Youth League gave inflammatory speeches, decrying the “stranglehold” that rich whites had on the economy. Leaked emails would later show that the groups received media training, and in some cases funds, from Oakbay. An atmosphere of menace slowly pervaded the country. In July 2016, the police minister announced the creation of a task force to investigate the murder of more than a dozen political figures. In the run-up to municipal elections that year, Mr. Zuma described the Democratic Alliance, the A.N.C.’s main rival, as a “white party,” adding that it could not “run this country no matter how they cover up by getting a few black stooges.” New and radical groups like Black First Land First sprang up, holding public rallies to fulminate against whites. At one, in May 2016, a pastor named Xola Skosana told the crowd, “We have been wounded beyond measure. Let us find the pillars and bring the house down. Black people must be avenged.” For the first time in years, whites felt a rising sense of personal danger. Nicholas Wolpe, a white South African whose father was a pioneer of the anti-apartheid movement, remembers a palpable anxiety. “There was a shift toward intolerance,” he said. “Gradually, the debate about white monopoly capital was everywhere and the people talking about it were loud and belligerent. It struck a nerve.” In a related and surreptitious campaign, the Guptas were being recast as warmhearted people eager to help the downtrodden. A website connected to Black First Land First ran editorials defending the brothers, suggesting in one that they should be “praised for saving jobs.” “Me and others felt that there was something strange going on under the surface of this onslaught,” said Pieter-Louis Myburgh, author of “The Republic of Gupta.” “Long before Bell Pottinger’s role became known, we smelled a rat.” The campaign coincided with a period in which the Guptas badly needed a makeover. The brothers had moved to South Africa from Uttar Pradesh in India in 1993 at the behest of their father, who thought the end of apartheid was a terrific business opportunity. The Guptas befriended a variety of A.N.C. luminaries, including Mr. Zuma. Relationships with politicians were soon producing results, said Mr. Myburgh. In 2016, South Africa’s Sunday Times listed Atul Gupta as the seventh richest man in the country, with a net worth equivalent to more than $700 million. The brothers had operated in relative obscurity until 2013, when a jet filled with some 200 guests attending the four-day wedding of a Gupta niece was given permission by a highly placed official to land at an air force base that ordinarily barred commercial traffic. The public was incensed. From there, the publicity would only get worse. Politicians described being summoned to the Gupta compound and offered ministerial jobs and, on occasion, multimillion-dollar bribes. In March 2016, a onetime A.N.C. member of Parliament named Vytjie Mentor wrote on Facebook, and later in a sworn affidavit, that the Guptas said she could become minister of public enterprises, though only if she helped cancel the India route flown by South African Airways. (The Guptas had links to a rival.) When she declined, Jacob Zuma ambled into the room and told her, in Zulu, “It’s OK, girl. Take care of yourself,” according to the affidavit. Bell Pottinger’s work for the Guptas was not widely known until November 2016, when a video interview of Ajay Gupta, arranged by the company, leaked to the media. The content of the interview was largely banal. It was proof, though, that one of Britain’s most famous P.R. firms was helping the brothers. The leak alarmed Mr. Henderson because the video resided exclusively on the company’s servers. Mr. Henderson hired Pelican Worldwide, a corporate intelligence firm, to determine whether someone had hacked Bell Pottinger’s system. When no signs of hacking were found, suspicion inside the company fell on Jonathan Lehrle and Darren Murphy, two executives who would depart in December 2016 and start a new P.R. firm with Mr. Bell. Mismanaging Its Own Crisis Bell Pottinger’s links to the Guptas went full-on radioactive in March of last year, when a mysterious 21-page report was posted on the website of the South African Communist Party. Written anonymously and without any cited sources, the report laid out the history of Bell Pottinger’s work for the Guptas, tagging the firm as the brains behind Twitter hashtags, like #HandsofftheGuptas and an array of bogus social media accounts. Mr. Henderson issued a news release asserting the report contained statements that were “wholly untrue.” He had a point. Although Bell Pottinger was widely blamed for the social media campaign, a forensic analysis performed by the African Network of Centers for Investigative Reporting concluded that it was created and overseen by employees and affiliates of the Guptas. In a report called “Manufacturing Divides,” the network found that much of the campaign was run out of a Gupta-financed “war room” at a marketing firm in India. Instead, the role of Bell Pottinger was to keep a close eye on social media related to the Guptas and their enemies. A cache of some 200,000 internal documents, christened the GuptaLeaks, that wound up in the media last summer, includes a Bell Pottinger presentation titled “Gupta Family online landscape briefing document.” It tracks mentions of the Guptas and a list of hashtags and keywords, some pro-Gupta, some anti-Gupta. “Sentiment is more positive in conversations online compared to yesterday,” the report states. Likewise, there is scant evidence that Bell Pottinger promoted “white monopoly capital,” the phrase that helped doom it. A law firm report commissioned by the company later concluded that employees of the firm had used the phrase “on occasion.” That is more often than is defensible, though it hardly explains the term’s sudden vogue. The 21-page document had credibility, however, because it contained details that only insiders could have known, some of which were utterly gratuitous. Like the cost to rent the Italian villa for the wedding of Victoria Geoghegan, the Bell Pottinger executive who led the South African team. A few days after the report went public, an anti-Zuma demonstration in South Africa included anti-Bell Pottinger placards. One showed a photograph of Ms. Geoghegan with blood dripping from her lips and the words “Gupta’s Girl” over her head. A demonstration in front of Bell Pottinger’s London office soon followed. In April, Bell Pottinger canceled its deal with the Guptas, citing “increasingly strong social media attacks on our staff and our business.” It didn’t help. Nor did Mr. Henderson’s “unequivocal and absolute apology” in July, or his resignation in September the day before Britain’s P.R. trade group tossed out Bell Pottinger. The company suffered £8 million worth of client losses in 48 hours and layoffs began soon after. Other companies linked, both directly and indirectly, with the Guptas are just beginning to deal with fallout of their own. The South African Companies and Intellectual Property Commission is pursuing criminal complaints that emerged from an investigation into state contracts and the Gupta-Zuma nexus, which have ensnared KPMG, SAP and McKinsey. A spokeswoman for KPMG said in a statement that apologies have been made “to those affected,” adding that nine senior partners at the company had departed. SAP issued a statement in October apologizing “wholeheartedly” and noting that three staff members had been placed on leave. McKinsey has denied involvement in acts of bribery or corruption and issued a statement saying, “We are sorry for the distress this matter has caused the people of South Africa.” For its part, Bell Pottinger never shook allegations that it ran that vitriolic social media campaign, nor that it was responsible for injecting “white monopoly capital” into the national dialogue. Clearly, Bell Pottinger was not an innocent bystander, and for a crisis management firm, it did a terrible job of managing this crisis. At least a dozen chances were missed to avert calamity. “As chief executive at the time, I take culpability for not closing down the account in the early stages,” Mr. Henderson said in an interview. “Whilst I was not involved at any time in any way in the account, I should have taken action earlier.” Its errors notwithstanding, the company ended up being blamed for an even greater number of misdeeds than it actually committed, and it is worth asking how that happened. Former employees contend that they were the target of — what else? — a furtive P.R. campaign. Inside Bell Pottinger, it was widely believed that Mr. Bell wanted to damage the company just enough to weaken Mr. Henderson and compel a change of leadership. “Rubbish,” said Mr. Bell, who stated that he had nothing to do with the 21-page report. At the same time, he readily acknowledges that he started plans to take control of Bell Pottinger as soon as he left it. He hoped to line up investors and buy up enough shares to force out Mr. Henderson. He said he abandoned the plan after deciding that the firm was beyond saving. ‘Damage Done’ The Gupta-Bell Pottinger campaign backfired on just about everyone, especially the Guptas. In an August statement, the brothers said they intended to sell all of their South African holdings by the end of 2017. Mr. Zuma could soon be removed by his party over issues of corruption and the stagnant economy. His term was supposed to end in 2019, but Cyril Ramaphosa, the man who became head of the A.N.C. in December, has called for Mr. Zuma to step down. A judicial inquiry was recently announced to investigate “state capture” and the president’s relationship to the Guptas. A spokesman for the Guptas did not return emails. President Zuma has repeatedly denied all accusations of corruption. Mr. Henderson lost everything when the firm failed, starting with his reputation. He became known as the guy in charge of a public relations company that perished in a public relations fiasco. The British media reported that he lost his entire life’s savings when Bell Pottinger evaporated and for a time, he also seemed to have lost his fiancée. The American socialite Heather Kerzner had invested a sizable chunk of her personal wealth in Bell Pottinger four months before it went under. The wedding was originally scheduled for November. Mr. Henderson said the couple hoped to marry. “That’s our intention,” he said. But arguably the greatest casualty of the Gupta-Bell Pottinger campaign is the very cause it nominally championed, helping impoverished blacks. Like most propaganda, the ideas promoted by the Guptas contained kernels of truth. The economic advancement of blacks postapartheid has indeed been painfully slow. The topic is now exponentially more fraught, given its association with the Guptas, who tried to use it as a way to enrich themselves and expand their power. For a young democracy that is grappling with a history of institutionalized racism and trying to spread wealth more evenly throughout the country, the results have been tragic. “The damage done by this campaign is not over,” said Sipho Pityana, a businessman who headed the Department of Labour under the Mandela administration. “It shapes the discourse about inequality in South Africa to this day.” https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/04/business/bell-pottinger-guptas-zuma-south-africa.html (c) 2018 The New York Times

By Danica Kirka Queen Elizabeth II talks to Gena Turgel who survived three Nazi concentration camps and helped comfort Anne Frank before her death WPA Pool—Getty Images LONDON — Gena Turgel, a Holocaust survivor who comforted Anne Frank at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp before the young diarist’s death and the camp’s liberation a month later, has died. She was 95. Turgel died Thursday, Britain’s chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, said on Twitter. The news triggered tributes from some of the people the Polish native touched in the decades she shared her World War II experiences, including witnessing the horrors of the Nazi camps at Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen. After World War II, Turgel married one of Bergen-Belsen’s British liberators, Norman Turgel, earning the nickname “The Bride of Belsen.” Her wedding dress, made from parachute silk, is part of the collection of the Imperial War Museum in London. Turgel attended Britain’s annual Holocaust remembrance event two months ago, sitting in a wheelchair with a blanket draped over her knees. “My story is the story of one survivor, but it is also the story of 6 million who perished,” she said at the event in London’s Hyde Park. “Maybe that’s why I was spared — so my testimony would serve as a memorial like that candle that I light, for the men, women and children who have no voice.” Born in Krakow, Poland as Gena Goldfinger on Feb. 1, 1923, Turgel and her family were forced to move into a Jewish ghetto with only a sack of potatoes, some flour and a few belongings in late 1941. One brother was shot by SS police and another disappeared after trying to escape, according to the Holocaust Educational Trust in London. A sister of hers was shot while trying to smuggle food into a labor camp. In January 1945, Turgel and her mother were forced onto a death march from Auschwitz, leaving her remaining sister behind. It was in a hospital at Bergen-Belsen, where the 22-year-old Turgel arrived in February, that she cared for Anne Frank as the 15-year-old girl was dying from typhus. “I washed her face, gave her water to drink, and I can still see that face, her hair and how she looked,” Turgel once told the BBC. Turgel published a memoir, “I Light a Candle,” in 1987 and kept retelling her story in schools across Britain until the end of her life. “Gena dedicated her life to sharing her testimony to hundreds of thousands in schools across the country,” ”Her story was difficult to hear – and difficult for her to tell, but no one who heard her speak will ever forget,” Karen Pollock, chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust, said. London Mayor Sadiq Khan said he met Turgel at the Hyde Park event in April and was “inspired by her lifelong commitment to educating people about the horrors of the Holocaust.” “Let us hope for a better future where anti-Semitism and all hatred should be demolished, shouldn’t be tolerated,” Turgel said at the time. “And I do beg you, don’t forget those who are less fortunate than yourselves. ” She is survived by her three children, as well as grandchildren and great grandchildren. (c) 2018 Time http://time.com/5307215/gena-turgel-anne-frank-holocaust-survivor/

As violence engulfs them, some Afghans carry notes with their names, blood types and relatives’ phone numbers in case they are killed or severely wounded. By David Zucchino and Fatima Faizy KABUL, Afghanistan — Tareq Qassemi, a bookseller, lost a close friend to a suicide bombing that killed 80 civilians in Kabul one scorching summer day. Four years later, he still mourns his friend, but also the nameless Afghans who perished with him. “Their bodies were shattered — the only thing that remained was a shoe or a bag or a pen,” he recalled. Mr. Qassemi, 28, now carries a special slip of paper, known as a pocket note, that contains his full name, his blood type and the phone numbers of family members — like a homemade, civilian version of a soldier’s dog tags. He knows too well how fragile and ephemeral life in Kabul can be, and he refuses to become an unidentified victim. “I could get killed on my way to work or in a car or anywhere, and no one knows about me and they will look for my body everywhere,” he said. “I could just vanish.” The bearers of pocket notes hope the slips of paper will help emergency medical workers identify an injured person’s blood type for a lifesaving transfusion. They might also help authorities quickly summon family members for precious final moments with a mortally wounded loved one. And they could help identify a badly disfigured corpse. For some young people, the pocket note has become an essential element of daily life. It can validate human existence — an identity marker ensuring that if violent death comes, it does not have to be anonymous. “If something happens to me, who will collect my body? What if I need blood?” said Masouma Tajik, 22, a computer science student in Kabul, whose family lives hundreds of miles away. Those questions confronted Ms. Tajik when she was stuck in a Kabul traffic jam one recent day, terrified that a car bomb might explode at any moment, she said. She now carries a slip of notebook paper with her personal information. The note says, “If anything happens to me.” In the years since the 2001 American invasion unleased a deadly Taliban insurgency, each new day has brought the potential of sudden death by car bombing, shooting, roadside explosion or rocket attack. Since signing a February agreement with the United States, the Taliban have curtailed mass-casualty attacks in urban centers. But the country has seen a rise in targeted assassinations, singling out government functionaries, prosecutors, journalists, religious scholars and civil society activists in near-daily attacks with guns or magnetic bombs attached to vehicles. The government has accused the Taliban of carrying out most of these killings, but they have repeatedly denied responsibility. Some officials worry that at least some of the attacks are being committed by political factions outside the Taliban to settle old scores, a disturbing trend harking back to Afghanistan’s civil war a generation ago. At the same time, the Islamic State has claimed responsibility for recent suicide bombings and other mass-casualty attacks in Kabul. A suicide bomber killed 44 people at a tutoring center on Oct. 24, and gunmen killed 21 more at Kabul University on Nov. 2. The constant threat of a sudden, brutal death has left many Afghans with a sense of despair and fatalism. The most prosaic acts can end violently — commuting to work, visiting a friend, buying groceries, striding into a classroom. “Every morning when I leave home, I am not sure if I’ll come back alive,” said Arifa Armaghan, 29, who works for a nongovernmental organization. “This is how we live in Afghanistan,” she added. “It is not just me. I talk to some people who say goodbye to their families every morning because they don’t know what will happen to them during the day.” Ms. Armaghan has carried a pocket note since July 2017, when a close childhood friend died in a Taliban suicide attack on a government minibus that also killed 23 other people. The body of the friend, Najiba Hussaini, was identified by her trademark silver ring, studded with a turquoise-colored stone. “When you lose people you know, you feel that you are next, and you feel death coming closer to you,” Ms. Armaghan said. After every mass bombing, she said, she and her friends send urgent text messages to loved ones. “There is always a fear that someone will never get back to you,” she said. Some of those who carry pocket notes say they have considered leaving the country. “But it is hard to decide when my brain is busy thinking about who will come to kill me,” said Mujeebullah Dastyar, 31, a geographic information specialist. For the past two years, he said, he has carried a pocket note with his name, blood type and a relative’s phone number. Some Afghans have posted messages on Facebook, warning of threats against them or detailing premonitions of death. Burhanuddin Yaftaly, 24, a former lieutenant in the Afghan army, was shot and killed by a Taliban gunman while attending his sister’s wedding in the northern province of Badakhshan in December. The bride was wounded when she tried to save her brother, police said. Mr. Yaftaly’s father, Khairuddin Ziaye, 61, said his son had been threatened by the Taliban. Shortly before his death, Mr. Yaftaly posted a final note on his Facebook page: “Dear friends: I am sorry for any mistakes I have made in the past. I have been receiving many threats from different sides. I think I won’t be able to survive anymore.” In Western nations, people routinely carry an array of items that can identify them, but in Afghanistan, things like driver’s licenses and employee badges are not as common, and credit cards are not used. Afghans are issued a tazkira, a national identity document, but few carry the card because considerable time and effort are required to replace it if lost. Rafi Bakhtiar, 21, a consultant, said he has carried his tazkira since the Kabul University attack on Nov. 2. That day, he said, neighbors searched into the night for their daughter, a student, before the university confirmed that she had died in the attack. The school used a contact number in a phone found on the student’s body to call Mr. Bathtiar’s sister, a close friend. “If I get killed, there should be evidence on me so people can get in touch with my family, and they don’t search the whole city to find my body,” Mr. Bakhtiar said. Like many Kabul residents, Mr. Bakhtiar said he had contempt for insurgents who kill civilians, but he also blamed the American-backed government for failing to safeguard its citizens. “If the government doesn’t do anything to protect us, you lose your hope and you can’t dream for a better future,” he said. Mr. Bakhtiar said he had accepted the harsh reality that he could die, capriciously and violently, on any given day anywhere in the capital. “We are broken. We are shattered,” he said. “The angel of death is flying over Afghanistan.” Najim Rahim contributed reporting from Kabul. © The New York Times 2021

By Dake Kang Activists are urging Unilever, a major investor in Myanmar, to speak out against the country's treatment of its Rohingya minority, which the U.N. has said may be "crimes against humanity." More than 10,000 people have joined the Facebook group for the campaign, known by the hashtag #WeAreAllRohingyaNow, and hundreds have signed on. A letter sent this week to Unilever CEO Paul Polman asked the company to clarify its stance on the Rohingya. "Silence in the face of genocide, whilst doing business, is simply not an option," said Britain-based campaign organizer Jamila Hanan. "Multinational corporations must start to speak out. They must be obliged to use their power and influence to help bring about a more just society in the regions in which they operate." Unilever did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Rights groups accuse the Myanmar army of burning homes, mass killings and rape in their sweeping counterinsurgency campaign in Rakhine state, where most of the estimated 1 million Rohingya live. The Muslim Rohingya have long faced systematic discrimination in Myanmar, a majority-Buddhist country. Most do not have citizenship and are considered illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, even when they've lived in Myanmar for generations. The #WeAreAllRohingyaNow group is seeking a restoration of citizenship rights denied to the Rohingya by a military government in 1982. Hanan says the group chose to target Unilever because it has been responsive to activists in the past. Unilever, with some $55 billion in revenue last year, is one of the world's largest consumer goods companies. Billions across the world buy Unilever-made Dove soap, Lipton tea, and Hellmann's mayonnaise. The company's first factory in Myanmar opened in 2013. It now manufactures food and shampoo near Yangon. Polman is a major advocate for corporate social responsibility and has won dozens of awards in eight years at Unilever's helm. He recently signed an open letter to the U.N. citing concerns about Myanmar's military offensives in Rakhine State — but not on behalf of Unilever, which has kept silent on the country's politics. "We're not asking for great things," Hanan said. "We're hoping that it will lead to a statement of concern. That would be a huge step forward. It's something corporations don't do." She said the group is waiting until next week to see if Unilever responds and if it doesn't it will start contacting members of the board of directors and shareholders directly. They plan to target other companies. "We're not going away," she said. Myanmar recently emerged from decades of isolationist military rule, holding landmark elections in 2015. Foreign investors rushed in, putting billions of dollars into one of Asia's fastest growing economies. Persecution of the Rohingya has intensified after deadly communal conflict with Rakhine Buddhists broke out in 2012. The latest bout of violence flared in October after an attack on a guard post left nine officers dead. It has displaced hundreds of thousands of people since then. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 Associated Press

Fighting intensified in the last quarter of 2020, after talks between the Afghan government and Taliban began. Before then, it had been a less deadly year than before. By David Zucchino KABUL, Afghanistan — Civilian casualties rose sharply in Afghanistan after peace negotiations between the government and the Taliban began in September, even as overall deaths and injuries dropped during 2020 compared with the previous year, the United Nations reported Tuesday. In its annual report documenting civilian injuries and deaths, the United Nations’ mission in Afghanistan found that the escalation in civilian casualties began shortly after intra-Afghan negotiations opened on Sept. 12 in Doha, Qatar, increasing by 45 percent in the final quarter of 2020 versus the same time period in 2019. The number of civilian casualties in November was the highest of any year that month since the U.N. began systematically documenting Afghan casualties in 2009, the report said. “2020 could have been the year of peace in Afghanistan,” said Deborah Lyons, the Special Representative of the U.N. secretary-general for Afghanistan. “Instead, thousands of Afghan civilians perished due to the conflict.” The report was released as talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban remain stalled amid unrelenting violence, and a February 2020 agreement between the United States and the Taliban is under review by the Biden administration. Following that agreement, made a year ago, the number of civilian casualties for the year was 15 percent lower than in 2019. The 8,820 civilian casualties documented in 2020 — 3,035 killed and 5,785 wounded — represented the first time since 2013 that this figure dropped below 10,000, the report said. The decline was attributed to a reduction by the Taliban of mass casualty attacks in major cities and a decline in the number of American airstrikes — both of which contributed to high civilian casualty rates in previous years. But civilian casualties surged in the fourth quarter as fighting raged in the countryside between the Taliban and Afghan government forces. At the same time, a targeted assassination campaign of shootings and bombings killed government workers and security force members, journalists, civil society advocates, and family members of combatants. Also targeted were religious minorities, especially Hazaras, most of whom are Shiite Muslim, and the country’s small Sikh population. The 2,792 civilian casualties (891 deaths and 1,901 injuries) recorded in the final three months of 2020 represented the second-highest total for this time period since 2009. The Taliban have denied targeted attacks against anyone other than government employees or supporters, but the Afghan government has blamed the militants for most such attacks. Last year was the seventh consecutive year that the U.N. has documented more than 3,000 civilian deaths, “with Afghanistan remaining among the deadliest places in the world to be a civilian,” the report said. The report noted that many Afghans had hoped that violence would diminish after government and Taliban negotiators began formal talks, which are aimed at agreeing on a road map for a future Afghan government and working toward a comprehensive cease-fire. “Instead, there was an escalation of violence with disturbing trends and consequences,” the U.N. report said. After the two sides agreed on procedures to guide negotiations in early December, the talks were recessed until the first week of January. But there have been no formal negotiations since then. Instead, there has been heavy fighting, as both sides await a decision by the Biden administration on whether to honor or extend the May 1 deadline for withdrawing the remaining 2,500 American troops in Afghanistan, as stipulated in the February 2020 agreement between the United States and the Taliban. Part of the increase in fourth-quarter casualties was caused by an increase in homemade magnetic bombs attached to vehicles and detonated by timer or remote control. The U.N. report also documented a continued high rate of civilian casualties caused by roadside and car bombs detonated by the Taliban and other anti-government elements. The U.N. report attributed 62 percent of civilian casualties in 2020 to anti-government elements, with the Taliban blamed for 45 percent of the overall total and the Islamic State in Afghanistan responsible for 8 percent. Another 9 percent was attributed to undetermined anti-government elements. Though the Islamic State has been weakened, and is mostly contained in the east, it has turned to guerrilla-style and mass-casualty attacks in urban areas, as it attempts to rebuild its ranks. Government forces were responsible for 22 percent of civilian casualties for the year, according to the report, with an additional 2 percent attributed to pro-government armed groups. The report attributed 13 percent of civilian casualties to crossfire or undetermined causes. American-led international forces were responsible for just 1 percent of civilian casualties in 2020, the report said — 120 civilian deaths and injuries, a decrease of 85 percent from 2019, when 786 casualties were attributed to international forces. It was the lowest number in that category since 2009. After the February 2020 agreement, the Taliban refrained from attacking American or other NATO forces. American commanders have generally limited airstrikes to instances in which government forces were under extreme threat during Taliban assaults. But that has not stopped U.S. aircraft from dropping hundreds of bombs with little accountability after the military stopped publicly reporting the strikes last year. A full year has passed in Afghanistan without an American combat death, the only such period since the United States invaded in 2001. The two most recent American combat deaths in Afghanistan occurred on Feb. 8, 2020, three weeks before the agreement was signed between the Taliban and the United States. Thomas Gibbons-Neff contributed reporting. © The New York Times 2021

By Cody Nelson | The Guardian 27 Oct 2021, 06.20 EDT Boost for advocates’ group is step further in decades-long fight against mining pollution. A protest sign saying ‘No Mining’ in Navajo is seen next to the entry to Northeast Church Rock abandoned uranium mine in Pinedale, New Mexico. Photograph: Pamela Peters/Reuters Capitan has been worrying about her water since 1994. It was that autumn she read a local newspaper article about another uranium mine, the Crownpoint Uranium Project, getting under way near her home. Capitan has spent her entire life in Crownpoint, New Mexico, a small town on the eastern Navajo Nation, and is no stranger to the uranium mining that has persisted in the region for decades. But it was around the time the article was published that she began learning about the many risks associated with uranium mining. “We as community members couldn’t just sit back and watch another company come in and just take what is very precious to us. And that is water – our water,” Capitan said. To this effect, Capitan and her husband, Mitchell, founded Eastern Navajo Diné Against Uranium Mining (Endaum). The group’s fight against uranium mining on their homeland has continued for nearly three decades, despite the industry’s disastrous health and environmental impacts being public knowledge for years. Capitan’s newest concerns are over the Canadian mining company Laramide Resources, which, through its US subsidiary NuFuels, holds a federal mining license for Crownpoint and nearby Church Rock. Due to the snail’s pace at which operations like this can move, Laramide hasn’t begun extraction in these areas, but is getting closer by the day. While the US legal system hasn’t given them much recourse to fight the mining, Capitan and other community members see new hope in the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Endaum and the New Mexico Environmental Law Center made a substantial evidence filing last week with the commission, alleging that the US government and its Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) have violated their human rights by licensing uranium mines in their communities. The petition with the commission won’t necessarily offer Endaum legal recourse. However, a favorable recommendation could help them in future legal proceedings against uranium mine projects while also guiding future advocacy on mining policy, said Eric Jantz, senior staff attorney at the New Mexico Environmental Law Center. He said it would also be a form of vindication: “There is moral value in having an international human rights body lay bare the abuses of the nuclear industry and the US government’s complicity in those abuses.” While these mines haven’t begun operation yet, the impending threat hangs over local residents’ heads – especially considering the deadly history of mining for the radioactive metal on the Navajo Nation beginning during the cold war. “There are four generations of Navajo folks who had to deal with existing contamination and who live essentially in the middle of or next door to radioactive waste dumps,” Jantz said. “And the federal government has ignored those communities for the last 70 years.” The type of mine in question uses in situ leach technology (ISL), also known as in situ reach (ISR), the most common form of uranium extraction. It involves drilling holes into the earth to reach the mineral deposit. A chemical solution is pumped underground, often into the aquifer, to dissolve the uranium deposit. This solution is then pumped back to the surface with the mineral in tow for processing. “The mineralization at Crownpoint has been previously shown to be amenable to ISR techniques,” Laramide says on its website. Residents, however, are deeply concerned about the risks of pollution. On the Navajo Nation, most uranium deposits sit in aquifers. Drilling into these aquifers can cause radioactive uranium to leach into the water, contaminating both the underground supply and the water absorbed from the surface. Laramide did not respond to a request for comment. On its website it says it has an “aquifer exemption on the property” from the Environmental Protection Agency. More than 500 abandoned uranium mines sit on Navajo Nation land today, each one a potential vector for unleashing more radioactive particles into the air and water, on top of the damage that’s already been done. Uranium mining operations have caused higher rates of cancer, respiratory diseases and kidney conditions among Navajos. From the 1970s to the 1990s, cancer rates on the reservation have doubled, according to its government. To this day, no mining company has fully cleaned an aquifer it polluted with in situ leach mining, according to the non-profit group Earthworks. Laramide’s proposed uranium mining operation would involve drilling in the Westwater Canyon Aquifer – which supplies water to about 15,000 Navajo people. For many Church Rock and Crownpoint residents, more uranium mining is simply a nonstarter. Larry King, a Church Rock resident who used to work on a uranium site, has problems breathing and a heart condition, according to testimony filed with the commission. He’s been advocating against Laramide and other uranium projects for more than two decades and says those fights have robbed him of any normalcy. “Those 24 years, those should have been the best years, when I could have been enjoying my life. I did not,” King testified. © 2021 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies.

Myanmar's military is losing ground against coordinated nationwide attacks, buoying opposition hopes Washington Post December 1, 2023 By David Rising | AP Rebel forces firing at Myanmar military position (Uncredited/The Kokang online media) BANGKOK — About two weeks into a major offensive against Myanmar’s military-run government by an alliance of three well-armed militias of ethnic minorities, an army captain, fighting in a jungle area near the northeastern border with China, lamented that he’d never seen such intense action. His commander in Myanmar’s 99th Light Infantry Division had been killed in fighting in Shan state the week before and the 35-year-old career soldier said army outposts were in disarray and being hit from all sides. “I have never faced these kinds of battles before,” the combat veteran told The Associated Press by phone. “This fighting in Shan is unprecedented.” Eight days later the captain was dead himself, killed defending an outpost and hastily buried near where he fell, according to his family. The coordinated offensive in the northeast has inspired resistance forces around the country to attack, and Myanmar’s military is falling back on almost every front. The army says it’s regrouping and will regain the initiative, but hope is rising among opponents that this could be a turning point in the struggle to oust the army leaders who toppled democratically elected Aung San Suu Kyi almost three years ago. “The current operation is a great opportunity to change the political situation in Myanmar, ” said Li Kyar Win, spokesperson for the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army, or MNDAA, one of the three militias known as the Three Brotherhood Alliance that launched the offensive on Oct. 27. “The goal and purpose of the alliance groups and other resistance forces are the same,” he told the AP. “We are trying to eliminate the military dictatorship.” Caught by surprise by the attack dubbed Operation 1027, the military has lost more than 180 outposts and strongpoints, including four major bases and four economically important border crossings with China. Both sides claim they have inflicted heavy tolls on the other, though accurate casualty figures are not available. Nearly 335,000 civilians have been displaced during the current fighting, bringing the total to more than 2 million displaced nationwide, according to the United Nations. In the latest assault, a coalition of militia forces attacked a town in southeastern Kayin state on Friday, blocking the main road to a key border town with Thailand. Residents said the military responded with artillery and airstrikes. “This is the biggest battlefield challenge that the Myanmar military has faced for decades,” Richard Horsey, the International Crisis Group’s Myanmar expert, said of the offensive. “And for the regime, this is by far the most difficult moment it’s faced since the early days of the coup.” Complicating matters for the military is China ‘s apparent tacit support for the Three Brotherhood Alliance, stemming, at least partially, from Beijing’s growing irritation at the burgeoning drug trade along its border and the proliferation of centers in Myanmar from which cyberscams are run, frequently by Chinese organized crime cartels with workers trafficked from China or elsewhere in the region. As Operation 1027 has gained ground, thousands of Chinese nationals involved in such operations have been repatriated into police custody in China, giving Beijing little reason to exert pressure on the Brotherhood to stop fighting. The military, known as the Tatmadaw, remains far bigger and better trained than the resistance forces, and has armor, airpower, and even naval assets to fight the lightly armed militias organized by various ethnic minority groups. But with its unexpectedly quick and widespread losses and overstretched forces, morale is sagging with more troops surrendering and defecting, giving rise to a wary optimism among its diverse opponents. The current gains are just part of what has been a long struggle, said Nay Phone Latt, a spokesperson for the National Unity Government, the leading opposition organization. “I would say the revolution has reached the next level, rather than to say it has reached a turning point,” he said. “What we have now is the results of our preparation, organization and building over nearly the past three years,” he said. The Feb. 1, 2021, seizure of power by army commander Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing brought thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators to the streets of Myanmar’s cities. Military leaders responded with brutal crackdowns and have arrested more than 25,000 people and killed more than 4,200 as of Friday, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, and U.N. independent investigators earlier this year accused the regime of being responsible for multiple war crimes. Its violent tactics gave rise to People’s Defense Forces, or PDFs — armed resistance forces that support the National Unity Government, many of which were trained by the ethnic armed organizations the military has fought in the country’s border regions for years. But resistance was fragmented until Operation 1027, when three of the country’s most powerful armed ethnic groups, the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army and the Ta’ang National Liberation Army in northeastern Shan state, and the Arakan Army in western Rakhine state, assembled a force of some 10,000 fighters, according to expert estimates, and rapidly overran military positions. Sensing weakness and inspired by the early successes of those attacks, the Kachin Independence Army followed by launching new attacks in northern Kachin state, then joined the Arakan Army to help lead a PDF group to take a town in central Sagaing, the heartland of traditional ethnic Bamar support for the Tatmadaw. In the eastern state of Kayah, also known as Karenni, an alliance of ethnic armed organizations launched their own attacks, beginning a direct assault on Nov. 11 on the state capital of Loikaw, where the Tatmadaw has a regional command base. In the fierce ongoing fighting for Loikaw, the military is using artillery and airstrikes to pound militia positions. But Khun Bedu, head of the Karenni Nationalities Defense Force, one of the biggest militias involved in the attack, said it was critical to take the Tatmadaw base. “We have time, and it is a good opportunity,” he told AP. Completing the encirclement of Tatmadaw forces, the Arakan Army attacked outposts in its home state of Rakhine in the country’s west on Nov. 13. Their success has been slow, with the Tatmadaw making use of naval power off the west coast to bombard positions, along with concentrated artillery and air strikes, according to a report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Morgan Michaels, who authored the report and runs the IISS Myanmar Conflict Map project, cautioned that the Tatmadaw has been able to concentrate its forces in strong points by abandoning positions and withdrawing, and remains a formidable force. “It’s not done fighting, and the air and artillery strikes are increasing and becoming more intense,” he said. “So we have to see how that plays out.” And despite their talk of ridding the country of the military regime, a lot of the fighting is also about the various groups seizing control of territory, especially the MNDAA, which was pushed out of the Kokang area of Shan state, including the capital Laukkaing, more than a decade ago by the military. “The military could probably end a lot of this with a deal if it needed to,” Michaels said. “It would have to give up something considerable, but I think it could stop the bleeding by giving the MNDAA a considerable concession if they absolutely needed to.” Still, unlike the civil war in Syria where multiple groups have different and often conflicting objectives, in Myanmar the anti-military groups are not fighting among each other, he said. “It’s important to emphasize that many groups have the shared goal of either overthrowing or dismantling or severely depleting the capacity of the military regime,” Michaels said. It was Nov. 15 when the AP first contacted the Tatmadaw captain, reaching him as he was fleeing a position through the jungle near the border town of Monekoe, one of the alliance’s primary targets. He was able to link up with others, and then led a column back to the Monekoe area to take charge of an outpost on Nov. 22, when he gave the AP a grim assessment of his situation. “We are surrounded by enemies,” he said, adding that even local army-affiliated militia could not be trusted. “Here it is difficult to differentiate between who is enemy or friend,” he said. The captain, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals against himself or his family for talking with the media, said there was not even enough time to eat a meal. “We have to be always ready in an attack position,” he said as the sound of gunfire and an explosion erupted in the background. “I can’t keep talking,” he said quickly. “They are coming to attack.” Well aware of Beijing’s irritation over the criminal activity along its border, the Three Brotherhood Alliance underlined as it launched its offensive that it was committed to “combatting the widespread online gambling fraud that has plagued Myanmar.” Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing has tried, unsuccessfully, to turn that on its head and say that the offensive is being funded by the drug trade. As militia forces have advanced toward the city of Laukkaing, where many of the scam centers were located, their operations have been scattering and many high-level suspects have been captured and turned over to China. Knowing China’s historic ties to the Brotherhood militias and the influence it wields, supporters of Myanmar’s ruling generals have held several demonstrations in major cities, including in front of the Chinese Embassy in Yangon, accusing China of aiding the militia alliance. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin skirted a question about those allegations this week, instead telling reporters that Beijing “respects the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Myanmar” and reiterating calls for peace. But Beijing’s actions speak louder than its words, Horsey said. “If they really wanted the cease-fire, they do have the leverage to enforce one or get pretty far toward enforcing one,” he said. “They haven’t done that, so that’s telling.” The AP last made contact with the captain fighting in Shan state on Nov. 23. The call was short. “I have something to prepare for our outpost,” he said hurriedly. “I will call you back.” The next call was from a relative on Nov. 25, who said they had been informed he was killed in a night raid on his outpost and buried on site. It was not clear exactly where the outpost was located, but only one battle was reported in the region that night. The Brotherhood’s Ta’ang National Liberation Army said its forces attacked a large military outpost in Lashio township on Nov. 23 and took it early the next day. In its matter-of-fact report, Ta’ang forces said they seized a howitzer, 78 smaller weapons and ammunition, and found the burial site of “more than 50 enemy.” Associated Press writer Ken Moritsugu in Beijing contributed to this story. Copyright 2023 Associated Press

At least 140 villagers killed by suspected herders in weekend attacks in north-central Nigeria The Washington Post December 26, 2023 By Chinedu Asadu | AP Burnt out house and property in Plateau State, Nigeria, destroyed by Fulani jihadist militias (AP Photo/AP) ABUJA, Nigeria — Gunmen attacked remote villages over the weekend in north-central Nigeria’s Plateau state, killing at least 140 people, officials and survivors said Tuesday, the latest case this year of such mass killings blamed on the farmer-herder crisis in the West African nation. The assailants targeted 17 communities in “senseless and unprovoked” attacks on Saturday and Sunday, burning down most houses in the area, Plateau Gov. Caleb Mutfwang said in a broadcast on the local Channels Television. “As I am talking to you, in Mangu local governorate alone, we buried 15 people. As of this morning, in Bokkos, we are counting not less than 100 corpses. I am yet to take stock of (the deaths in) Barkin Ladi,” Mutfwan said. “It has been a very terrifying Christmas for us here in Plateau.” Amnesty International’s Nigeria office told The Associated Press that it has so far confirmed 140 deaths in the Christian-dominated Bokkos and Barkin-Ladi areas of Plateau, based on data compiled by its workers on the ground and from local officials. There were fears of a higher death toll as some people remained unaccounted for. Some of the locals said that it took more than 12 hours before security agencies responded to their call for help, a claim the AP couldn’t independently verify, but which echoes past concerns about slow interventions in Nigeria‘s deadly security crisis, which has killed hundreds this year, including in Plateau. “I called security but they never came. The ambush started 6 in the evening but security reached our place by 7 in the morning,” said Sunday Dawum, a youth leader in Bokkos. At least 27 people were killed in his village, Mbom Mbaru, including his brother, he said. No group took responsibility for the attacks though blame fell on herders from the Fulani tribe, who have been accused of carrying out such mass killings across the northwest and central regions where the decades long conflict over access to land and water has further worsened the sectarian division between Christians and Muslims in Africa’s most populous nation. The Nigerian army said it has begun “clearance operations” in search of suspects, with the help of other security agencies, although arrests are rare in such attacks. Abdullsalam Abubakar, who commands the army’s special intervention operation in Plateau and neighboring states, said his forces “will not rest” until they find those responsible. Nigerian President Bola Tinubu, who was elected this year after promising to tackle security challenges his predecessor had failed to address, instructed security agencies to “scour every stretch of the zone and apprehend the culprits,” according to a statement from his office. He also ordered the “immediate mobilization of relief resources” for the survivors and prompt medical treatment for the wounded, it added. Amnesty’s Nigeria director Isa Sanusi said Tinubu’s government and others have failed to take “tangible action” to protect lives and ensure justice for victims in the conflict-hit northern region. “Sometimes they claim to make arrests but there is no proof they have done so,” he said. “The brazen failure of the authorities to protect the people of Nigeria is gradually becoming the norm.” Copyright 2023 The Washington Post/AP

Benjamin Netanyahu (left) has taken a close interest in the intelligence operations against the ICC and its chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, sources say. Composite: Guardian Design/Getty Israel’s nine-year ‘war’ on the ICC The Guardian 28 May 2024 By Harry Davies, Bethan McKernan and Yuval Abraham in Jerusalem and Meron Rapoport in Tel Aviv Exclusive: Investigation reveals how intelligence agencies tried to derail Benjamin Netanyahu (left) has taken a close interest in the intelligence operations against the ICC and its chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, sources say. Composite: Guardian Design/Getty Israel’s nine-year ‘war’ on the ICC Exclusive: Investigation reveals how intelligence agencies tried to derail war crimes prosecution, with Netanyahu ‘obsessed’ with intercepts Benjamin Netanyahu (left) has taken a close interest in the intelligence operations against the ICC and its chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, sources say. Composite: Guardian Design/Getty Israel’s nine-year ‘war’ on the ICC Exclusive: Investigation reveals how intelligence agencies tried to derail war crimes prosecution, with Netanyahu ‘obsessed’ with intercepts The Guardian 28 May 2024 Harry Davies, Bethan McKernan and Yuval Abraham in Jerusalem and Meron Rapoport in Tel Aviv When the chief prosecutor of the international criminal court (ICC) announced he was seeking arrest warrants against Israeli and Hamas leaders, he issued a cryptic warning: “I insist that all attempts to impede, intimidate or improperly influence the officials of this court must cease immediately.” Karim Khan did not provide specific details of attempts to interfere in the ICC’s work, but he noted a clause in the court’s foundational treaty that made any such interference a criminal offence. If the conduct continued, he added, “my office will not hesitate to act”. The prosecutor did not say who had attempted to intervene in the administration of justice, or how exactly they had done so. Now, an investigation by the Guardian and the Israeli-based magazines +972 and Local Call can reveal how Israel has run an almost decade-long secret “war” against the court. The country deployed its intelligence agencies to surveil, hack, pressure, smear and allegedly threaten senior ICC staff in an effort to derail the court’s inquiries. Israeli intelligence captured the communications of numerous ICC officials, including Khan and his predecessor as prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, intercepting phone calls, messages, emails and documents. The surveillance was ongoing in recent months, providing Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, with advance knowledge of the prosecutor’s intentions. A recent intercepted communication suggested that Khan wanted to issue arrest warrants against Israelis but was under “tremendous pressure from the United States”, according to a source familiar with its contents. Karim Khan. The surveillance was ongoing in recent months, providing Netanyahu with advance knowledge of Khan’s intentions. Photograph: Luis Acosta/AFP/Getty Images Bensouda, who as chief prosecutor opened the ICC’s investigation in 2021, paving the way for last week’s announcement, was also spied on and allegedly threatened. Netanyahu has taken a close interest in the intelligence operations against the ICC, and was described by one intelligence source as being “obsessed” with intercepts about the case. Overseen by his national security advisers, the efforts involved the domestic spy agency, the Shin Bet, as well as the military’s intelligence directorate, Aman, and cyber-intelligence division, Unit 8200. Intelligence gleaned from intercepts was, sources said, disseminated to government ministries of justice, foreign affairs and strategic affairs. A covert operation against Bensouda, revealed on Tuesday by the Guardian, was run personally by Netanyahu’s close ally Yossi Cohen, who was at the time the director of Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, the Mossad. At one stage, the spy chief even enlisted the help of the then president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Joseph Kabila. Details of Israel’s nine-year campaign to thwart the ICC’s inquiry have been uncovered by the Guardian, an Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and Local Call, a Hebrew-language outlet. The joint investigation draws on interviews with more than two dozen current and former Israeli intelligence officers and government officials, senior ICC figures, diplomats and lawyers familiar with the ICC case and Israel’s efforts to undermine it. Contacted by the Guardian, a spokesperson for the ICC said it was aware of “proactive intelligence-gathering activities being undertaken by a number of national agencies hostile towards the court”. They said the ICC was continually implementing countermeasures against such activity, and that “none of the recent attacks against it by national intelligence agencies” had penetrated the court’s core evidence holdings, which had remained secure. A spokesperson for Israel’s prime minister’s office said: “The questions forwarded to us are replete with many false and unfounded allegations meant to hurt the state of Israel.” A military spokesperson added: “The IDF [Israel Defense Forces] did not and does not conduct surveillance or other intelligence operations against the ICC.” Since it was established in 2002, the ICC has served as a permanent court of last resort for the prosecution of individuals accused of some of the world’s worst atrocities. It has charged the former Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir, the late Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi and most recently, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. Khan’s decision to seek warrants against Netanyahu and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, along with Hamas leaders implicated in the 7 October attack, marks the first time an ICC prosecutor has sought arrest warrants against the leader of a close western ally. Displaced Palestinians collecting water in a neighbourhood in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, that has been devastated by Israeli airstrikes. Photograph: Eyad Baba/AFP/Getty Images The allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity that Khan has levelled against Netanyahu and Gallant all relate to Israel’s eight-month war in Gaza, which according to the territory’s health authority has killed more than 35,000 people. But the ICC case has been a decade in the making, inching forward amid rising alarm among Israeli officials at the possibility of arrest warrants, which would prevent those accused from travelling to any of the court’s 124 member states for fear of arrest. It is this spectre of prosecutions in The Hague that one former Israeli intelligence official said had led the “entire military and political establishment” to regard the counteroffensive against the ICC “as a war that had to be waged, and one that Israel needed to be defended against. It was described in military terms.” That “war” commenced in January 2015, when it was confirmed that Palestine would join the court after it was recognised as a state by the UN general assembly. Its accession was condemned by Israeli officials as a form of “diplomatic terrorism”. One former defence official familiar with Israel’s counter-ICC effort said joining the court had been “perceived as the crossing of a red line” and “perhaps the most aggressive” diplomatic move taken by the Palestinian Authority, which governs the West Bank. “To be recognised as a state in the UN is nice,” they added. “But the ICC is a mechanism with teeth.” Mahmoud Abbas (second from left), the president of the Palestinian Authority, after a meeting with Bensouda in The Hague in October 2015. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images A hand-delivered threat For Fatou Bensouda, a respected Gambian lawyer who was elected the ICC’s chief prosecutor in 2012, the accession of Palestine to the court brought with it a momentous decision. Under the Rome statute, the treaty that established the court, the ICC can exercise its jurisdiction only over crimes within member states or by nationals of those states. Israel, like the US, Russia and China, is not a member. After Palestine’s acceptance as an ICC member, any alleged war crimes – committed by those of any nationality – in occupied Palestinian territories now fell under Bensouda’s jurisdiction. On 16 January 2015, within weeks of Palestine joining, Bensouda opened a preliminary examination into what in the legalese of the court was called “the situation in Palestine”. The following month, two men who had managed to obtain the prosecutor’s private address turned up at her home in The Hague. Sources familiar with the incident said the men declined to identify themselves when they arrived, but said they wanted to hand-deliver a letter to Bensouda on behalf of an unknown German woman who wanted to thank her. The envelope contained hundreds of dollars in cash and a note with an Israeli phone number. Fatou Bensouda’s caseload also included nine full investigations, including into events in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Photograph: Peter Dejong/AP Sources with knowledge of an ICC review into the incident said that while it was not possible to identify the men, or fully establish their motives, it was concluded that Israel was likely to be signalling to the prosecutor that it knew where she lived. The ICC reported the incident to Dutch authorities and put in place additional security, installing CCTV cameras at her home. The ICC’s preliminary inquiry in the Palestinian territories was one of several such fact-finding exercises the court was undertaking at the time, as a precursor to a possible full investigation. Bensouda’s caseload also included nine full investigations, including into events in DRC, Kenya and the Darfur region of Sudan. Officials in the prosecutor’s office believed the court was vulnerable to espionage activity and introduced countersurveillance measures to protect their confidential inquiries. In Israel, the prime minister’s national security council (NSC) had mobilised a response involving its intelligence agencies. Netanyahu and some of the generals and spy chiefs who authorised the operation had a personal stake in its outcome. Unlike the international court of justice (ICJ), a UN body that deals with the legal responsibility of nation states, the ICC is a criminal court that prosecutes individuals, targeting those deemed most responsible for atrocities. The international criminal court in The Hague, the Netherlands. Photograph: Mike Corder/AP Multiple Israeli sources said the leadership of the IDF wanted military intelligence to join the effort, which was being led by other spy agencies, to ensure senior officers could be protected from charges. “We were told that senior officers are afraid to accept positions in the West Bank because they are afraid of being prosecuted in The Hague,” one source recalled. Two intelligence officials involved in procuring intercepts about the ICC said the prime minister’s office took a keen interest in their work. Netanyahu’s office, one said, would send “areas of interests” and “instructions” in relation to the monitoring of court officials. Another described the prime minister as “obsessed” with intercepts shedding light on the activities of the ICC. Hacked emails and monitored calls Five sources familiar with Israel’s intelligence activities said it routinely spied on the phone calls made by Bensouda and her staff with Palestinians. Blocked by Israel from accessing Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, the ICC was forced to conduct much of its research by telephone, which made it more susceptible to surveillance. Thanks to their comprehensive access to Palestinian telecoms infrastructure, the sources said, intelligence operatives could capture the calls without installing spyware on the ICC official’s devices. “If Fatou Bensouda spoke to any person in the West Bank or Gaza, then that phone call would enter [intercept] systems,” one source said. Another said there was no hesitation internally over spying on the prosecutor, adding: “With Bensouda, she’s black and African, so who cares?” The surveillance system did not capture calls between ICC officials and anyone outside Palestine. However, multiple sources said the system required the active selection of the overseas phone numbers of ICC officials whose calls Israeli intelligence agencies decided to listen to. According to one Israeli source, a large whiteboard in an Israeli intelligence department contained the names of about 60 people under surveillance – half of them Palestinians and half from other countries, including UN officials and ICC personnel. In The Hague, Bensouda and her senior staff were alerted by security advisers and via diplomatic channels that Israel was monitoring their work. A former senior ICC official recalled: “We were made aware they were trying to get information on where we were with the preliminary examination.” Officials also became aware of specific threats against a prominent Palestinian NGO, Al-Haq, which was one of several Palestinian human rights groups that frequently submitted information to the ICC inquiry, often in lengthy documents detailing incidents it wanted the prosecutor to consider. The Palestinian Authority submitted similar dossiers. The Al-Haq office in Ramallah, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, in 2021. Photograph: Mohamad Torokman/Reuters Such documents often contained sensitive information such as testimony from potential witnesses. Al-Haq’s submissions are also understood to have linked specific allegations of Rome statute crimes to senior officials, including chiefs of the IDF, directors of the Shin Bet, and defence ministers such as Benny Gantz. Years later, after the ICC had opened a full investigation into the Palestine case, Gantz designated Al-Haq and five other Palestinian rights groups as “terrorist organisations”, a label that was rejected by multiple European states and later found by the CIA to be unsupported by evidence. The organisations said the designations were a “targeted assault” against those most actively engaging with the ICC. According to multiple current and former intelligence officials, military cyber-offensive teams and the Shin Bet both systematically monitored the employees of Palestinian NGOs and the Palestinian Authority who were engaging with the ICC. Two intelligence sources described how Israeli operatives hacked into the emails of Al-Haq and other groups communicating with Bensouda’s office. One of the sources said the Shin Bet even installed Pegasus spyware, developed by the private-sector NSO Group, on the phones of multiple Palestinian NGO employees, as well as two senior Palestinian Authority officials. Keeping tabs on the Palestinian submissions to the ICC’s inquiry was viewed as part of the Shin Bet’s mandate, but some army officials were concerned that spying on a foreign civilian entity crossed a line, as it had little to do with military operations. “It has nothing to do with Hamas, it has nothing to do with stability in the West Bank,” one military source said of the ICC surveillance. Another added: “We used our resources to spy on Fatou Bensouda – this isn’t something legitimate to do as military intelligence.” Secret meetings with the ICC Legitimate or otherwise, the surveillance of the ICC and Palestinians making the case for prosecutions against Israelis provided the Israeli government with an advantage in a secret back channel it had opened with the prosecutor’s office. Israel’s meetings with the ICC were highly sensitive: if made public, they had the potential to undermine the government’s official position that it did not recognise the court’s authority. According to six sources familiar with the meetings, they consisted of a delegation of top government lawyers and diplomats who travelled to The Hague. Two of the sources said the meetings were authorised by Netanyahu. The Israeli delegation was drawn from the justice ministry, foreign ministry and the military advocate general’s office. The meetings took place between 2017 and 2019, and were led by the prominent Israeli lawyer and diplomat Tal Becker. “In the beginning it was tense,” recalled a former ICC official. “We would get into details of specific incidents. We’d say: ‘We’re receiving allegations about these attacks, these killings,’ and they would provide us with information.” Tal Becker at the ICJ in January. Photograph: Hollandse Hoogte/REX/Shutterstock A person with direct knowledge of Israel’s preparation for the back-channel meetings said officials in the justice ministry were furnished with intelligence that had been gleaned from Israeli surveillance intercepts before delegations arrived at The Hague. “The lawyers who dealt with the issue at the justice ministry had a big thirst for intelligence information,” they said. For the Israelis, the back-channel meetings, while sensitive, presented a unique opportunity to directly present legal arguments challenging the prosecutor’s jurisdiction over the Palestinian territories. They also sought to convince the prosecutor that, despite the Israeli military’s highly questionable record of investigating wrongdoing in its ranks, it had robust procedures for holding its armed forces to account. This was a critical issue for Israel. A core ICC principle, known as complementarity, prevents the prosecutor from investigating or trying individuals if they are the subject of credible state-level investigations or criminal proceedings. Israeli surveillance operatives were asked to find out which specific incidents might form part of a future ICC prosecution, multiple sources said, in order to enable Israeli investigative bodies to “open investigations retroactively” in the same cases. “If materials were transferred to the ICC, we had to understand exactly what they were, to ensure that the IDF investigated them independently and sufficiently so that they could claim complementarity,” one source explained. Israel’s back-channel meetings with the ICC ended in December 2019, when Bensouda, announcing the end of her preliminary examination, said she believed there was a “reasonable basis” to conclude that Israel and Palestinian armed groups had both committed war crimes in the occupied territories. Bensouda made clear in December 2019 she intended to open a full investigation. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images It was a significant setback for Israel’s leaders, although it could have been worse. In a move that some in the government regarded as a partial vindication of Israel’s lobbying efforts, Bensouda stopped short of launching a formal investigation. Instead, she announced she would ask a panel of ICC judges to rule on the contentious question of the court’s jurisdiction over the Palestinian territories, due to “unique and highly contested legal and factual issues”. Yet Bensouda had made clear she was minded to open a full investigation if the judges gave her the green light. It was against this backdrop that Israel ramped up its campaign against the ICC and turned to its top spy chief to turn up the heat on Bensouda personally. Personal threats and a ‘smear campaign’ Between late 2019 and early 2021, as the pre-trial chamber considered the jurisdictional questions, the director of the Mossad, Yossi Cohen, intensified his efforts to persuade Bensouda not to proceed with the investigation. Cohen’s contacts with Bensouda – which were described to the Guardian by four people familiar with the prosecutor’s contemporaneous accounts of the interactions, as well as sources briefed on the Mossad operation – had begun several years earlier. In one of the earliest encounters, Cohen surprised Bensouda when he made an unexpected appearance at an official meeting the prosecutor was holding with the then DRC president, Joseph Kabila, in a New York hotel suite. Joseph Kabila at a news conference in Kinshasa in 2018. Photograph: Kenny-Katombe Butunka/Reuters Sources familiar with the meeting said that after Bensouda’s staff were asked to leave the room, the director of the Mossad suddenly appeared from behind a door in a carefully choreographed “ambush”. After the incident in New York, Cohen persisted in contacting the prosecutor, turning up unannounced and subjecting her to unwanted calls. While initially amicable, the sources said, Cohen’s behaviour became increasingly threatening and intimidating. A close ally of Netanyahu at the time, Cohen was a veteran Mossad spymaster and had gained a reputation within the service as a skilled recruiter of agents with experience cultivating high-level officials in foreign governments. Accounts of his secret meetings with Bensouda paint a picture in which he sought to “build a relationship” with the prosecutor as he attempted to dissuade her from pursuing an investigation that, if it went ahead, could embroil senior Israeli officials. Three sources briefed on Cohen’s activities said they understood the spy chief had tried to recruit Bensouda into complying with Israel’s demands during the period in which she was waiting for a ruling from the pre-trial chamber. They said he became more threatening after he began to realise the prosecutor would not be persuaded to abandon the investigation. At one stage, Cohen is said to have made comments about Bensouda’s security and thinly veiled threats about the consequences for her career if she proceeded. Contacted by the Guardian, Cohen and Kabila did not respond to requests for comment. Bensouda declined to comment. Cohen was seen as trying to ‘build a relationship’ with the prosecutor as he attempted to dissuade her from pursuing the investigation. Photograph: Corinna Kern/Reuters When she was prosecutor, Bensouda formally disclosed her encounters with Cohen to a small group within the ICC, with the intention of putting on record her belief that she had been “personally threatened”, sources familiar with the disclosures said. This was not the only way Israel sought to place pressure on the prosecutor. At around the same time, ICC officials discovered details of what sources described as a diplomatic “smear campaign”, relating in part to a close family member. According to multiple sources, the Mossad had obtained a cache of material including transcripts of an apparent sting operation against Bensouda’s husband. The origins of the material – and whether it was genuine – remain unclear. However, elements of the information were circulated by Israel among western diplomatic officials, sources said, in a failed attempt to discredit the chief prosecutor. A person briefed on the campaign said it gained little traction among diplomats and amounted to a desperate attempt to “besmirch” Bensouda’s reputation. Trump’s campaign against the ICC In March 2020, three months after Bensouda referred the Palestine case to the pre-trial chamber, an Israeli government delegation reportedly held discussions in Washington with senior US officials about “a joint Israeli-American struggle” against the ICC. One Israeli intelligence official said they regarded Donald Trump’s administration as more cooperative than that of his Democratic predecessor. The Israelis felt sufficiently comfortable to ask for information from US intelligence about Bensouda, a request the source said would have been “impossible” during Barack Obama’s tenure. Trump and Netanyahu before the signing of the Abraham accords at the White House in 2020. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images Days before the meetings in Washington, Bensouda had received authorisation from the ICC’s judges to pursue a separate investigation into war crimes in Afghanistan committed by the Taliban and both Afghan and US military personnel. Fearing US armed forces would be prosecuted, the Trump administration was engaged in its own aggressive campaign against the ICC, culminating in the summer of 2020 with the imposition of US economic sanctions on Bensouda and one of her top officials. Among ICC officials, the US-led financial and visa restrictions on court personnel were believed to relate as much to the Palestine investigation as to the Afghanistan case. Two former ICC officials said senior Israeli officials had expressly indicated to them that Israel and the US were working together. At a press conference in June that year, senior Trump administration figures signalled their intention to impose sanctions on ICC officials, announcing they had received unspecified information about “financial corruption and malfeasance at the highest levels of the office of the prosecutor”. As well as referring to the Afghanistan case, Mike Pompeo, Trump’s secretary of state, linked the US measures to the Palestine case. “It’s clear the ICC is only putting Israel in [its] crosshairs for nakedly political purposes,” he said. Months later, Pompeo accused Bensouda of having “engaged in corrupt acts for her personal benefit”. The US has never publicly provided any information to substantiate that charge, and Joe Biden lifted the sanctions months after he entered the White House. Mike Pompeo at a joint news conference on the ICC sanctions in June 2020. Photograph: Yuri Gripas/AFP/Getty Images But at the time Bensouda faced increasing pressure from an apparently concerted effort behind the scenes by the two powerful allies. As a Gambian national, she did not enjoy the political protection that other ICC colleagues from western countries had by virtue of their citizenship. A former ICC source said this left her “vulnerable and isolated”. Cohen’s activities, sources said, were particularly concerning for the prosecutor and led her to fear for her personal safety. When the pre-trial chamber finally confirmed the ICC had jurisdiction in Palestine in February 2021, some at the ICC even believed Bensouda should leave the final decision to open a full investigation to her successor. On 3 March, however, months before the end of her nine-year term, Bensouda announced a full investigation in the Palestine case, setting in motion a process that could lead to criminal charges, though she cautioned the next phase could take time. “Any investigation undertaken by the office will be conducted independently, impartially and objectively, without fear or favour,” she said. “To both Palestinian and Israeli victims and affected communities, we urge patience.” Khan announces arrest warrants When Khan took the helm at the ICC prosecutor’s office in June 2021, he inherited an investigation he later said “lies on the San Andreas fault of international politics and strategic interests”. As he took office, other investigations – including on events in the Philippines, DRC, Afghanistan and Bangladesh – competed for his attention, and in March 2022, days after Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, he opened a high-profile investigation into alleged Russian war crimes. Initially, the politically sensitive Palestine inquiry was not treated as a priority by the British prosecutor’s team, sources familiar with the case said. One said it was in effect “on the shelf” – but Khan’s office disputes this and says it established a dedicated investigative team to take the inquiry forward. In Israel, the government’s top lawyers regarded Khan – who had previously defended warlords such as the former Liberian president Charles Taylor – as a more cautious prosecutor than Bensouda. One former senior Israeli official said there was “lots of respect” for Khan, unlike for his predecessor. His appointment to the court was viewed as a “reason for optimism”, they said, but they added that the 7 October attack “changed that reality”. The Hamas assault on southern Israel, in which Palestinian militants killed nearly 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped about 250 people, clearly involved brazen war crimes. So, too, in the view of many legal experts, has Israel’s subsequent onslaught on Gaza, which is estimated to have killed more than 35,000 people and brought the territory to the brink of famine through Israel’s obstruction of humanitarian aid. By the end of the third week of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, Khan was on the ground at the Rafah border crossing. He subsequently made visits to the West Bank and southern Israel, where he was invited to meet survivors of the 7 October attack and the relatives of people who had been killed. In February 2024, Khan issued a strongly worded statement that Netanyahu’s legal advisers interpreted as an ominous sign. In the post on X, he in effect warned Israel against launching an assault on Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city, where more than 1 million displaced people were sheltering at the time. “I am deeply concerned by the reported bombardment and potential ground incursion by Israeli forces in Rafah,” he wrote. “Those who do not comply with the law should not complain later when my office takes action.” Children standing amid the rubble of a building in Rafah that was destroyed by Israeli airstrikes in February. Photograph: Mohammed Abed/AFP/Getty Images The comments stirred alarm within the Israeli government as they appeared to deviate from his previous statements about the war, which officials had viewed as reassuringly cautious. “That tweet surprised us a lot,” a senior official said. Concerns in Israel over Khan’s intentions escalated last month when the government briefed the media that it believed the prosecutor was contemplating arrest warrants against Netanyahu and other senior officials such as Yoav Gallant. Israeli intelligence had intercepted emails, attachments and text messages from Khan and other officials in his office. “The subject of the ICC climbed the ladder of priorities for Israeli intelligence,” one intelligence source said. It was via intercepted communications that Israel established that Khan was at one stage considering entering Gaza through Egypt and wanted urgent assistance doing so “without Israel’s permission”. Another Israeli intelligence assessment, circulated widely in the intelligence community, drew on surveillance of a call between two Palestinian politicians. One of them said Khan had indicated that a request for arrest warrants of Israeli leaders could be imminent, but warned he was “under tremendous pressure from the United States”. It was against this backdrop that Netanyahu made a series of public statements warning a request for arrest warrants could be imminent. He called on “the leaders of the free world to stand firmly against the ICC” and “use all the means at their disposal to stop this dangerous move”. He added: “Branding Israel’s leaders and soldiers as war criminals will pour jet fuel on the fires of antisemitism.” In Washington, a group of senior US Republican senators had already sent a threatening letter to Khan with a clear warning: “Target Israel and we will target you.” Netanyahu (left) and Yoav Gallant during a press conference in Tel Aviv in October. Photograph: Reuters The ICC, meanwhile, has strengthened its security with regular sweeps of the prosecutor’s offices, security checks on devices, phone-free areas, weekly threat assessments and the introduction of specialist equipment. An ICC spokesperson said Khan’s office had been subjected to “several forms of threats and communications that could be viewed as attempts to unduly influence its activities”. Khan recently disclosed in an interview with CNN that some elected leaders had been “very blunt” with him as he prepared to issue arrest warrants. “‘This court is built for Africa and for thugs like Putin,’ is was what a senior leader told me.” Despite the pressure, Khan, like his predecessor in the prosecutor’s office, chose to press ahead. Last week, Khan announced he was seeking arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant alongside three Hamas leaders for war crimes and crimes against humanity. He said Israel’s prime minister and defence minister stood accused of responsibility for extermination, starvation, the denial of humanitarian relief supplies and deliberate targeting of civilians. Standing at a lectern with two of his top prosecutors – one American, the other British – at his side, Khan said he had repeatedly told Israel to take urgent action to comply with humanitarian law. “I specifically underlined that starvation as a method of war and the denial of humanitarian relief constitute Rome statute offences. I could not have been clearer,” he said. “As I also repeatedly underlined in my public statements, those who do not comply with the law should not complain later when my office takes action. That day has come.” · Ex-Mossad chief ‘disappointed’ over alleged threats against ICC prosecutor 21h ago · Israeli campaign against ICC may be ‘crimes against justice’, say legal experts 3d ago · Labor backs ICC’s role in international law as other MPs condemn Israeli ‘war’ on court 3d ago · First Thing: Israel’s nine-year ‘war’ of spying, hacking and intimidating the ICC exposed 3d ago · By attacking and undermining the ICC, Israel has proved again it is a state gone rogue 3d ago · Revealed: Israeli spy chief ‘threatened’ ICC prosecutor over war crimes inquiry 4d ago · ICC prosecutor seeks arrest warrants for Israeli PM and Hamas officials for war crimes 20 May 2024 · Calls for international criminal court to end ‘impunity’ for environmental crimes 26 Mar 2024 · Armenia formally joins international criminal court in snub to Russia 31 Jan 2024 · UK government challenged over ICC inquiry into Israel’s conduct 12 Nov 2023 © 2024 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. (dcr) The Guardian 28 May 2024 Harry Davies, Bethan McKernan and Yuval Abraham in Jerusalem and Meron Rapoport in Tel Aviv When the chief prosecutor of the international criminal court (ICC) announced he was seeking arrest warrants against Israeli and Hamas leaders, he issued a cryptic warning: “I insist that all attempts to impede, intimidate or improperly influence the officials of this court must cease immediately.” Karim Khan did not provide specific details of attempts to interfere in the ICC’s work, but he noted a clause in the court’s foundational treaty that made any such interference a criminal offence. If the conduct continued, he added, “my office will not hesitate to act”. The prosecutor did not say who had attempted to intervene in the administration of justice, or how exactly they had done so. Now, an investigation by the Guardian and the Israeli-based magazines +972 and Local Call can reveal how Israel has run an almost decade-long secret “war” against the court. The country deployed its intelligence agencies to surveil, hack, pressure, smear and allegedly threaten senior ICC staff in an effort to derail the court’s inquiries. Israeli intelligence captured the communications of numerous ICC officials, including Khan and his predecessor as prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, intercepting phone calls, messages, emails and documents. The surveillance was ongoing in recent months, providing Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, with advance knowledge of the prosecutor’s intentions. A recent intercepted communication suggested that Khan wanted to issue arrest warrants against Israelis but was under “tremendous pressure from the United States”, according to a source familiar with its contents. Karim Khan. The surveillance was ongoing in recent months, providing Netanyahu with advance knowledge of Khan’s intentions. Photograph: Luis Acosta/AFP/Getty Images Bensouda, who as chief prosecutor opened the ICC’s investigation in 2021, paving the way for last week’s announcement, was also spied on and allegedly threatened. Netanyahu has taken a close interest in the intelligence operations against the ICC, and was described by one intelligence source as being “obsessed” with intercepts about the case. Overseen by his national security advisers, the efforts involved the domestic spy agency, the Shin Bet, as well as the military’s intelligence directorate, Aman, and cyber-intelligence division, Unit 8200. Intelligence gleaned from intercepts was, sources said, disseminated to government ministries of justice, foreign affairs and strategic affairs. A covert operation against Bensouda, revealed on Tuesday by the Guardian, was run personally by Netanyahu’s close ally Yossi Cohen, who was at the time the director of Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, the Mossad. At one stage, the spy chief even enlisted the help of the then president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Joseph Kabila. Details of Israel’s nine-year campaign to thwart the ICC’s inquiry have been uncovered by the Guardian, an Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and Local Call, a Hebrew-language outlet. The joint investigation draws on interviews with more than two dozen current and former Israeli intelligence officers and government officials, senior ICC figures, diplomats and lawyers familiar with the ICC case and Israel’s efforts to undermine it. Contacted by the Guardian, a spokesperson for the ICC said it was aware of “proactive intelligence-gathering activities being undertaken by a number of national agencies hostile towards the court”. They said the ICC was continually implementing countermeasures against such activity, and that “none of the recent attacks against it by national intelligence agencies” had penetrated the court’s core evidence holdings, which had remained secure. A spokesperson for Israel’s prime minister’s office said: “The questions forwarded to us are replete with many false and unfounded allegations meant to hurt the state of Israel.” A military spokesperson added: “The IDF [Israel Defense Forces] did not and does not conduct surveillance or other intelligence operations against the ICC.” Since it was established in 2002, the ICC has served as a permanent court of last resort for the prosecution of individuals accused of some of the world’s worst atrocities. It has charged the former Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir, the late Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi and most recently, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. Khan’s decision to seek warrants against Netanyahu and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, along with Hamas leaders implicated in the 7 October attack, marks the first time an ICC prosecutor has sought arrest warrants against the leader of a close western ally. Displaced Palestinians collecting water in a neighbourhood in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, that has been devastated by Israeli airstrikes. Photograph: Eyad Baba/AFP/Getty Images The allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity that Khan has levelled against Netanyahu and Gallant all relate to Israel’s eight-month war in Gaza, which according to the territory’s health authority has killed more than 35,000 people. But the ICC case has been a decade in the making, inching forward amid rising alarm among Israeli officials at the possibility of arrest warrants, which would prevent those accused from travelling to any of the court’s 124 member states for fear of arrest. It is this spectre of prosecutions in The Hague that one former Israeli intelligence official said had led the “entire military and political establishment” to regard the counteroffensive against the ICC “as a war that had to be waged, and one that Israel needed to be defended against. It was described in military terms.” That “war” commenced in January 2015, when it was confirmed that Palestine would join the court after it was recognised as a state by the UN general assembly. Its accession was condemned by Israeli officials as a form of “diplomatic terrorism”. One former defence official familiar with Israel’s counter-ICC effort said joining the court had been “perceived as the crossing of a red line” and “perhaps the most aggressive” diplomatic move taken by the Palestinian Authority, which governs the West Bank. “To be recognised as a state in the UN is nice,” they added. “But the ICC is a mechanism with teeth.” Mahmoud Abbas (second from left), the president of the Palestinian Authority, after a meeting with Bensouda in The Hague in October 2015. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images A hand-delivered threat For Fatou Bensouda, a respected Gambian lawyer who was elected the ICC’s chief prosecutor in 2012, the accession of Palestine to the court brought with it a momentous decision. Under the Rome statute, the treaty that established the court, the ICC can exercise its jurisdiction only over crimes within member states or by nationals of those states. Israel, like the US, Russia and China, is not a member. After Palestine’s acceptance as an ICC member, any alleged war crimes – committed by those of any nationality – in occupied Palestinian territories now fell under Bensouda’s jurisdiction. On 16 January 2015, within weeks of Palestine joining, Bensouda opened a preliminary examination into what in the legalese of the court was called “the situation in Palestine”. The following month, two men who had managed to obtain the prosecutor’s private address turned up at her home in The Hague. Sources familiar with the incident said the men declined to identify themselves when they arrived, but said they wanted to hand-deliver a letter to Bensouda on behalf of an unknown German woman who wanted to thank her. The envelope contained hundreds of dollars in cash and a note with an Israeli phone number. Fatou Bensouda’s caseload also included nine full investigations, including into events in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Photograph: Peter Dejong/AP Sources with knowledge of an ICC review into the incident said that while it was not possible to identify the men, or fully establish their motives, it was concluded that Israel was likely to be signalling to the prosecutor that it knew where she lived. The ICC reported the incident to Dutch authorities and put in place additional security, installing CCTV cameras at her home. The ICC’s preliminary inquiry in the Palestinian territories was one of several such fact-finding exercises the court was undertaking at the time, as a precursor to a possible full investigation. Bensouda’s caseload also included nine full investigations, including into events in DRC, Kenya and the Darfur region of Sudan. Officials in the prosecutor’s office believed the court was vulnerable to espionage activity and introduced countersurveillance measures to protect their confidential inquiries. In Israel, the prime minister’s national security council (NSC) had mobilised a response involving its intelligence agencies. Netanyahu and some of the generals and spy chiefs who authorised the operation had a personal stake in its outcome. Unlike the international court of justice (ICJ), a UN body that deals with the legal responsibility of nation states, the ICC is a criminal court that prosecutes individuals, targeting those deemed most responsible for atrocities. The international criminal court in The Hague, the Netherlands. Photograph: Mike Corder/AP Multiple Israeli sources said the leadership of the IDF wanted military intelligence to join the effort, which was being led by other spy agencies, to ensure senior officers could be protected from charges. “We were told that senior officers are afraid to accept positions in the West Bank because they are afraid of being prosecuted in The Hague,” one source recalled. Two intelligence officials involved in procuring intercepts about the ICC said the prime minister’s office took a keen interest in their work. Netanyahu’s office, one said, would send “areas of interests” and “instructions” in relation to the monitoring of court officials. Another described the prime minister as “obsessed” with intercepts shedding light on the activities of the ICC. Hacked emails and monitored calls Five sources familiar with Israel’s intelligence activities said it routinely spied on the phone calls made by Bensouda and her staff with Palestinians. Blocked by Israel from accessing Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, the ICC was forced to conduct much of its research by telephone, which made it more susceptible to surveillance. Thanks to their comprehensive access to Palestinian telecoms infrastructure, the sources said, intelligence operatives could capture the calls without installing spyware on the ICC official’s devices. “If Fatou Bensouda spoke to any person in the West Bank or Gaza, then that phone call would enter [intercept] systems,” one source said. Another said there was no hesitation internally over spying on the prosecutor, adding: “With Bensouda, she’s black and African, so who cares?” The surveillance system did not capture calls between ICC officials and anyone outside Palestine. However, multiple sources said the system required the active selection of the overseas phone numbers of ICC officials whose calls Israeli intelligence agencies decided to listen to. According to one Israeli source, a large whiteboard in an Israeli intelligence department contained the names of about 60 people under surveillance – half of them Palestinians and half from other countries, including UN officials and ICC personnel. In The Hague, Bensouda and her senior staff were alerted by security advisers and via diplomatic channels that Israel was monitoring their work. A former senior ICC official recalled: “We were made aware they were trying to get information on where we were with the preliminary examination.” Officials also became aware of specific threats against a prominent Palestinian NGO, Al-Haq, which was one of several Palestinian human rights groups that frequently submitted information to the ICC inquiry, often in lengthy documents detailing incidents it wanted the prosecutor to consider. The Palestinian Authority submitted similar dossiers. The Al-Haq office in Ramallah, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, in 2021. Photograph: Mohamad Torokman/Reuters Such documents often contained sensitive information such as testimony from potential witnesses. Al-Haq’s submissions are also understood to have linked specific allegations of Rome statute crimes to senior officials, including chiefs of the IDF, directors of the Shin Bet, and defence ministers such as Benny Gantz. Years later, after the ICC had opened a full investigation into the Palestine case, Gantz designated Al-Haq and five other Palestinian rights groups as “terrorist organisations”, a label that was rejected by multiple European states and later found by the CIA to be unsupported by evidence. The organisations said the designations were a “targeted assault” against those most actively engaging with the ICC. According to multiple current and former intelligence officials, military cyber-offensive teams and the Shin Bet both systematically monitored the employees of Palestinian NGOs and the Palestinian Authority who were engaging with the ICC. Two intelligence sources described how Israeli operatives hacked into the emails of Al-Haq and other groups communicating with Bensouda’s office. One of the sources said the Shin Bet even installed Pegasus spyware, developed by the private-sector NSO Group, on the phones of multiple Palestinian NGO employees, as well as two senior Palestinian Authority officials. Keeping tabs on the Palestinian submissions to the ICC’s inquiry was viewed as part of the Shin Bet’s mandate, but some army officials were concerned that spying on a foreign civilian entity crossed a line, as it had little to do with military operations. “It has nothing to do with Hamas, it has nothing to do with stability in the West Bank,” one military source said of the ICC surveillance. Another added: “We used our resources to spy on Fatou Bensouda – this isn’t something legitimate to do as military intelligence.” Secret meetings with the ICC Legitimate or otherwise, the surveillance of the ICC and Palestinians making the case for prosecutions against Israelis provided the Israeli government with an advantage in a secret back channel it had opened with the prosecutor’s office. Israel’s meetings with the ICC were highly sensitive: if made public, they had the potential to undermine the government’s official position that it did not recognise the court’s authority. According to six sources familiar with the meetings, they consisted of a delegation of top government lawyers and diplomats who travelled to The Hague. Two of the sources said the meetings were authorised by Netanyahu. The Israeli delegation was drawn from the justice ministry, foreign ministry and the military advocate general’s office. The meetings took place between 2017 and 2019, and were led by the prominent Israeli lawyer and diplomat Tal Becker. “In the beginning it was tense,” recalled a former ICC official. “We would get into details of specific incidents. We’d say: ‘We’re receiving allegations about these attacks, these killings,’ and they would provide us with information.” Tal Becker at the ICJ in January. Photograph: Hollandse Hoogte/REX/Shutterstock A person with direct knowledge of Israel’s preparation for the back-channel meetings said officials in the justice ministry were furnished with intelligence that had been gleaned from Israeli surveillance intercepts before delegations arrived at The Hague. “The lawyers who dealt with the issue at the justice ministry had a big thirst for intelligence information,” they said. For the Israelis, the back-channel meetings, while sensitive, presented a unique opportunity to directly present legal arguments challenging the prosecutor’s jurisdiction over the Palestinian territories. They also sought to convince the prosecutor that, despite the Israeli military’s highly questionable record of investigating wrongdoing in its ranks, it had robust procedures for holding its armed forces to account. This was a critical issue for Israel. A core ICC principle, known as complementarity, prevents the prosecutor from investigating or trying individuals if they are the subject of credible state-level investigations or criminal proceedings. Israeli surveillance operatives were asked to find out which specific incidents might form part of a future ICC prosecution, multiple sources said, in order to enable Israeli investigative bodies to “open investigations retroactively” in the same cases. “If materials were transferred to the ICC, we had to understand exactly what they were, to ensure that the IDF investigated them independently and sufficiently so that they could claim complementarity,” one source explained. Israel’s back-channel meetings with the ICC ended in December 2019, when Bensouda, announcing the end of her preliminary examination, said she believed there was a “reasonable basis” to conclude that Israel and Palestinian armed groups had both committed war crimes in the occupied territories. Bensouda made clear in December 2019 she intended to open a full investigation. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images It was a significant setback for Israel’s leaders, although it could have been worse. In a move that some in the government regarded as a partial vindication of Israel’s lobbying efforts, Bensouda stopped short of launching a formal investigation. Instead, she announced she would ask a panel of ICC judges to rule on the contentious question of the court’s jurisdiction over the Palestinian territories, due to “unique and highly contested legal and factual issues”. Yet Bensouda had made clear she was minded to open a full investigation if the judges gave her the green light. It was against this backdrop that Israel ramped up its campaign against the ICC and turned to its top spy chief to turn up the heat on Bensouda personally. Personal threats and a ‘smear campaign’ Between late 2019 and early 2021, as the pre-trial chamber considered the jurisdictional questions, the director of the Mossad, Yossi Cohen, intensified his efforts to persuade Bensouda not to proceed with the investigation. Cohen’s contacts with Bensouda – which were described to the Guardian by four people familiar with the prosecutor’s contemporaneous accounts of the interactions, as well as sources briefed on the Mossad operation – had begun several years earlier. In one of the earliest encounters, Cohen surprised Bensouda when he made an unexpected appearance at an official meeting the prosecutor was holding with the then DRC president, Joseph Kabila, in a New York hotel suite. Joseph Kabila at a news conference in Kinshasa in 2018. Photograph: Kenny-Katombe Butunka/Reuters Sources familiar with the meeting said that after Bensouda’s staff were asked to leave the room, the director of the Mossad suddenly appeared from behind a door in a carefully choreographed “ambush”. After the incident in New York, Cohen persisted in contacting the prosecutor, turning up unannounced and subjecting her to unwanted calls. While initially amicable, the sources said, Cohen’s behaviour became increasingly threatening and intimidating. A close ally of Netanyahu at the time, Cohen was a veteran Mossad spymaster and had gained a reputation within the service as a skilled recruiter of agents with experience cultivating high-level officials in foreign governments. Accounts of his secret meetings with Bensouda paint a picture in which he sought to “build a relationship” with the prosecutor as he attempted to dissuade her from pursuing an investigation that, if it went ahead, could embroil senior Israeli officials. Three sources briefed on Cohen’s activities said they understood the spy chief had tried to recruit Bensouda into complying with Israel’s demands during the period in which she was waiting for a ruling from the pre-trial chamber. They said he became more threatening after he began to realise the prosecutor would not be persuaded to abandon the investigation. At one stage, Cohen is said to have made comments about Bensouda’s security and thinly veiled threats about the consequences for her career if she proceeded. Contacted by the Guardian, Cohen and Kabila did not respond to requests for comment. Bensouda declined to comment. Cohen was seen as trying to ‘build a relationship’ with the prosecutor as he attempted to dissuade her from pursuing the investigation. Photograph: Corinna Kern/Reuters When she was prosecutor, Bensouda formally disclosed her encounters with Cohen to a small group within the ICC, with the intention of putting on record her belief that she had been “personally threatened”, sources familiar with the disclosures said. This was not the only way Israel sought to place pressure on the prosecutor. At around the same time, ICC officials discovered details of what sources described as a diplomatic “smear campaign”, relating in part to a close family member. According to multiple sources, the Mossad had obtained a cache of material including transcripts of an apparent sting operation against Bensouda’s husband. The origins of the material – and whether it was genuine – remain unclear. However, elements of the information were circulated by Israel among western diplomatic officials, sources said, in a failed attempt to discredit the chief prosecutor. A person briefed on the campaign said it gained little traction among diplomats and amounted to a desperate attempt to “besmirch” Bensouda’s reputation. Trump’s campaign against the ICC In March 2020, three months after Bensouda referred the Palestine case to the pre-trial chamber, an Israeli government delegation reportedly held discussions in Washington with senior US officials about “a joint Israeli-American struggle” against the ICC. One Israeli intelligence official said they regarded Donald Trump’s administration as more cooperative than that of his Democratic predecessor. The Israelis felt sufficiently comfortable to ask for information from US intelligence about Bensouda, a request the source said would have been “impossible” during Barack Obama’s tenure. Trump and Netanyahu before the signing of the Abraham accords at the White House in 2020. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images Days before the meetings in Washington, Bensouda had received authorisation from the ICC’s judges to pursue a separate investigation into war crimes in Afghanistan committed by the Taliban and both Afghan and US military personnel. Fearing US armed forces would be prosecuted, the Trump administration was engaged in its own aggressive campaign against the ICC, culminating in the summer of 2020 with the imposition of US economic sanctions on Bensouda and one of her top officials. Among ICC officials, the US-led financial and visa restrictions on court personnel were believed to relate as much to the Palestine investigation as to the Afghanistan case. Two former ICC officials said senior Israeli officials had expressly indicated to them that Israel and the US were working together. At a press conference in June that year, senior Trump administration figures signalled their intention to impose sanctions on ICC officials, announcing they had received unspecified information about “financial corruption and malfeasance at the highest levels of the office of the prosecutor”. As well as referring to the Afghanistan case, Mike Pompeo, Trump’s secretary of state, linked the US measures to the Palestine case. “It’s clear the ICC is only putting Israel in [its] crosshairs for nakedly political purposes,” he said. Months later, Pompeo accused Bensouda of having “engaged in corrupt acts for her personal benefit”. The US has never publicly provided any information to substantiate that charge, and Joe Biden lifted the sanctions months after he entered the White House. Mike Pompeo at a joint news conference on the ICC sanctions in June 2020. Photograph: Yuri Gripas/AFP/Getty Images But at the time Bensouda faced increasing pressure from an apparently concerted effort behind the scenes by the two powerful allies. As a Gambian national, she did not enjoy the political protection that other ICC colleagues from western countries had by virtue of their citizenship. A former ICC source said this left her “vulnerable and isolated”. Cohen’s activities, sources said, were particularly concerning for the prosecutor and led her to fear for her personal safety. When the pre-trial chamber finally confirmed the ICC had jurisdiction in Palestine in February 2021, some at the ICC even believed Bensouda should leave the final decision to open a full investigation to her successor. On 3 March, however, months before the end of her nine-year term, Bensouda announced a full investigation in the Palestine case, setting in motion a process that could lead to criminal charges, though she cautioned the next phase could take time. “Any investigation undertaken by the office will be conducted independently, impartially and objectively, without fear or favour,” she said. “To both Palestinian and Israeli victims and affected communities, we urge patience.” Khan announces arrest warrants When Khan took the helm at the ICC prosecutor’s office in June 2021, he inherited an investigation he later said “lies on the San Andreas fault of international politics and strategic interests”. As he took office, other investigations – including on events in the Philippines, DRC, Afghanistan and Bangladesh – competed for his attention, and in March 2022, days after Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, he opened a high-profile investigation into alleged Russian war crimes. Initially, the politically sensitive Palestine inquiry was not treated as a priority by the British prosecutor’s team, sources familiar with the case said. One said it was in effect “on the shelf” – but Khan’s office disputes this and says it established a dedicated investigative team to take the inquiry forward. In Israel, the government’s top lawyers regarded Khan – who had previously defended warlords such as the former Liberian president Charles Taylor – as a more cautious prosecutor than Bensouda. One former senior Israeli official said there was “lots of respect” for Khan, unlike for his predecessor. His appointment to the court was viewed as a “reason for optimism”, they said, but they added that the 7 October attack “changed that reality”. The Hamas assault on southern Israel, in which Palestinian militants killed nearly 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped about 250 people, clearly involved brazen war crimes. So, too, in the view of many legal experts, has Israel’s subsequent onslaught on Gaza, which is estimated to have killed more than 35,000 people and brought the territory to the brink of famine through Israel’s obstruction of humanitarian aid. By the end of the third week of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, Khan was on the ground at the Rafah border crossing. He subsequently made visits to the West Bank and southern Israel, where he was invited to meet survivors of the 7 October attack and the relatives of people who had been killed. In February 2024, Khan issued a strongly worded statement that Netanyahu’s legal advisers interpreted as an ominous sign. In the post on X, he in effect warned Israel against launching an assault on Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city, where more than 1 million displaced people were sheltering at the time. “I am deeply concerned by the reported bombardment and potential ground incursion by Israeli forces in Rafah,” he wrote. “Those who do not comply with the law should not complain later when my office takes action.” Children standing amid the rubble of a building in Rafah that was destroyed by Israeli airstrikes in February. Photograph: Mohammed Abed/AFP/Getty Images The comments stirred alarm within the Israeli government as they appeared to deviate from his previous statements about the war, which officials had viewed as reassuringly cautious. “That tweet surprised us a lot,” a senior official said. Concerns in Israel over Khan’s intentions escalated last month when the government briefed the media that it believed the prosecutor was contemplating arrest warrants against Netanyahu and other senior officials such as Yoav Gallant. Israeli intelligence had intercepted emails, attachments and text messages from Khan and other officials in his office. “The subject of the ICC climbed the ladder of priorities for Israeli intelligence,” one intelligence source said. It was via intercepted communications that Israel established that Khan was at one stage considering entering Gaza through Egypt and wanted urgent assistance doing so “without Israel’s permission”. Another Israeli intelligence assessment, circulated widely in the intelligence community, drew on surveillance of a call between two Palestinian politicians. One of them said Khan had indicated that a request for arrest warrants of Israeli leaders could be imminent, but warned he was “under tremendous pressure from the United States”. It was against this backdrop that Netanyahu made a series of public statements warning a request for arrest warrants could be imminent. He called on “the leaders of the free world to stand firmly against the ICC” and “use all the means at their disposal to stop this dangerous move”. He added: “Branding Israel’s leaders and soldiers as war criminals will pour jet fuel on the fires of antisemitism.” In Washington, a group of senior US Republican senators had already sent a threatening letter to Khan with a clear warning: “Target Israel and we will target you.” Netanyahu (left) and Yoav Gallant during a press conference in Tel Aviv in October. Photograph: Reuters The ICC, meanwhile, has strengthened its security with regular sweeps of the prosecutor’s offices, security checks on devices, phone-free areas, weekly threat assessments and the introduction of specialist equipment. An ICC spokesperson said Khan’s office had been subjected to “several forms of threats and communications that could be viewed as attempts to unduly influence its activities”. Khan recently disclosed in an interview with CNN that some elected leaders had been “very blunt” with him as he prepared to issue arrest warrants. “‘This court is built for Africa and for thugs like Putin,’ is was what a senior leader told me.” Despite the pressure, Khan, like his predecessor in the prosecutor’s office, chose to press ahead. Last week, Khan announced he was seeking arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant alongside three Hamas leaders for war crimes and crimes against humanity. He said Israel’s prime minister and defence minister stood accused of responsibility for extermination, starvation, the denial of humanitarian relief supplies and deliberate targeting of civilians. Standing at a lectern with two of his top prosecutors – one American, the other British – at his side, Khan said he had repeatedly told Israel to take urgent action to comply with humanitarian law. “I specifically underlined that starvation as a method of war and the denial of humanitarian relief constitute Rome statute offences. I could not have been clearer,” he said. “As I also repeatedly underlined in my public statements, those who do not comply with the law should not complain later when my office takes action. That day has come.” · Ex-Mossad chief ‘disappointed’ over alleged threats against ICC prosecutor 21h ago · Israeli campaign against ICC may be ‘crimes against justice’, say legal experts 3d ago · Labor backs ICC’s role in international law as other MPs condemn Israeli ‘war’ on court 3d ago · First Thing: Israel’s nine-year ‘war’ of spying, hacking and intimidating the ICC exposed 3d ago · By attacking and undermining the ICC, Israel has proved again it is a state gone rogue 3d ago · Revealed: Israeli spy chief ‘threatened’ ICC prosecutor over war crimes inquiry 4d ago · ICC prosecutor seeks arrest warrants for Israeli PM and Hamas officials for war crimes 20 May 2024 · Calls for international criminal court to end ‘impunity’ for environmental crimes 26 Mar 2024 · Armenia formally joins international criminal court in snub to Russia 31 Jan 2024 · UK government challenged over ICC inquiry into Israel’s conduct 12 Nov 2023 © 2024 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. (dcr) war crimes prosecution, with Netanyahu ‘obsessed’ with intercepts When the chief prosecutor of the international criminal court (ICC) announced he was seeking arrest warrants against Israeli and Hamas leaders, he issued a cryptic warning: “I insist that all attempts to impede, intimidate or improperly influence the officials of this court must cease immediately.” Karim Khan did not provide specific details of attempts to interfere in the ICC’s work, but he noted a clause in the court’s foundational treaty that made any such interference a criminal offence. If the conduct continued, he added, “my office will not hesitate to act”. The prosecutor did not say who had attempted to intervene in the administration of justice, or how exactly they had done so. Now, an investigation by the Guardian and the Israeli-based magazines +972 and Local Call can reveal how Israel has run an almost decade-long secret “war” against the court. The country deployed its intelligence agencies to surveil, hack, pressure, smear and allegedly threaten senior ICC staff in an effort to derail the court’s inquiries. Israeli intelligence captured the communications of numerous ICC officials, including Khan and his predecessor as prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, intercepting phone calls, messages, emails and documents. The surveillance was ongoing in recent months, providing Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, with advance knowledge of the prosecutor’s intentions. A recent intercepted communication suggested that Khan wanted to issue arrest warrants against Israelis but was under “tremendous pressure from the United States”, according to a source familiar with its contents. Karim Khan. The surveillance was ongoing in recent months, providing Netanyahu with advance knowledge of Khan’s intentions. Photograph: Luis Acosta/AFP/Getty Images Bensouda, who as chief prosecutor opened the ICC’s investigation in 2021, paving the way for last week’s announcement, was also spied on and allegedly threatened. Netanyahu has taken a close interest in the intelligence operations against the ICC, and was described by one intelligence source as being “obsessed” with intercepts about the case. Overseen by his national security advisers, the efforts involved the domestic spy agency, the Shin Bet, as well as the military’s intelligence directorate, Aman, and cyber-intelligence division, Unit 8200. Intelligence gleaned from intercepts was, sources said, disseminated to government ministries of justice, foreign affairs and strategic affairs. A covert operation against Bensouda, revealed on Tuesday by the Guardian, was run personally by Netanyahu’s close ally Yossi Cohen, who was at the time the director of Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, the Mossad. At one stage, the spy chief even enlisted the help of the then president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Joseph Kabila. Details of Israel’s nine-year campaign to thwart the ICC’s inquiry have been uncovered by the Guardian, an Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and Local Call, a Hebrew-language outlet. The joint investigation draws on interviews with more than two dozen current and former Israeli intelligence officers and government officials, senior ICC figures, diplomats and lawyers familiar with the ICC case and Israel’s efforts to undermine it. Contacted by the Guardian, a spokesperson for the ICC said it was aware of “proactive intelligence-gathering activities being undertaken by a number of national agencies hostile towards the court”. They said the ICC was continually implementing countermeasures against such activity, and that “none of the recent attacks against it by national intelligence agencies” had penetrated the court’s core evidence holdings, which had remained secure. A spokesperson for Israel’s prime minister’s office said: “The questions forwarded to us are replete with many false and unfounded allegations meant to hurt the state of Israel.” A military spokesperson added: “The IDF [Israel Defense Forces] did not and does not conduct surveillance or other intelligence operations against the ICC.” Since it was established in 2002, the ICC has served as a permanent court of last resort for the prosecution of individuals accused of some of the world’s worst atrocities. It has charged the former Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir, the late Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi and most recently, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. Khan’s decision to seek warrants against Netanyahu and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, along with Hamas leaders implicated in the 7 October attack, marks the first time an ICC prosecutor has sought arrest warrants against the leader of a close western ally. Displaced Palestinians collecting water in a neighbourhood in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, that has been devastated by Israeli airstrikes. Photograph: Eyad Baba/AFP/Getty Images The allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity that Khan has levelled against Netanyahu and Gallant all relate to Israel’s eight-month war in Gaza, which according to the territory’s health authority has killed more than 35,000 people. But the ICC case has been a decade in the making, inching forward amid rising alarm among Israeli officials at the possibility of arrest warrants, which would prevent those accused from travelling to any of the court’s 124 member states for fear of arrest. It is this spectre of prosecutions in The Hague that one former Israeli intelligence official said had led the “entire military and political establishment” to regard the counteroffensive against the ICC “as a war that had to be waged, and one that Israel needed to be defended against. It was described in military terms.” That “war” commenced in January 2015, when it was confirmed that Palestine would join the court after it was recognised as a state by the UN general assembly. Its accession was condemned by Israeli officials as a form of “diplomatic terrorism”. One former defence official familiar with Israel’s counter-ICC effort said joining the court had been “perceived as the crossing of a red line” and “perhaps the most aggressive” diplomatic move taken by the Palestinian Authority, which governs the West Bank. “To be recognised as a state in the UN is nice,” they added. “But the ICC is a mechanism with teeth.” Mahmoud Abbas (second from left), the president of the Palestinian Authority, after a meeting with Bensouda in The Hague in October 2015. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images A hand-delivered threat For Fatou Bensouda, a respected Gambian lawyer who was elected the ICC’s chief prosecutor in 2012, the accession of Palestine to the court brought with it a momentous decision. Under the Rome statute, the treaty that established the court, the ICC can exercise its jurisdiction only over crimes within member states or by nationals of those states. Israel, like the US, Russia and China, is not a member. After Palestine’s acceptance as an ICC member, any alleged war crimes – committed by those of any nationality – in occupied Palestinian territories now fell under Bensouda’s jurisdiction. On 16 January 2015, within weeks of Palestine joining, Bensouda opened a preliminary examination into what in the legalese of the court was called “the situation in Palestine”. The following month, two men who had managed to obtain the prosecutor’s private address turned up at her home in The Hague. Sources familiar with the incident said the men declined to identify themselves when they arrived, but said they wanted to hand-deliver a letter to Bensouda on behalf of an unknown German woman who wanted to thank her. The envelope contained hundreds of dollars in cash and a note with an Israeli phone number. Fatou Bensouda’s caseload also included nine full investigations, including into events in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Photograph: Peter Dejong/AP Sources with knowledge of an ICC review into the incident said that while it was not possible to identify the men, or fully establish their motives, it was concluded that Israel was likely to be signalling to the prosecutor that it knew where she lived. The ICC reported the incident to Dutch authorities and put in place additional security, installing CCTV cameras at her home. The ICC’s preliminary inquiry in the Palestinian territories was one of several such fact-finding exercises the court was undertaking at the time, as a precursor to a possible full investigation. Bensouda’s caseload also included nine full investigations, including into events in DRC, Kenya and the Darfur region of Sudan. Officials in the prosecutor’s office believed the court was vulnerable to espionage activity and introduced countersurveillance measures to protect their confidential inquiries. In Israel, the prime minister’s national security council (NSC) had mobilised a response involving its intelligence agencies. Netanyahu and some of the generals and spy chiefs who authorised the operation had a personal stake in its outcome. Unlike the international court of justice (ICJ), a UN body that deals with the legal responsibility of nation states, the ICC is a criminal court that prosecutes individuals, targeting those deemed most responsible for atrocities. The international criminal court in The Hague, the Netherlands. Photograph: Mike Corder/AP Multiple Israeli sources said the leadership of the IDF wanted military intelligence to join the effort, which was being led by other spy agencies, to ensure senior officers could be protected from charges. “We were told that senior officers are afraid to accept positions in the West Bank because they are afraid of being prosecuted in The Hague,” one source recalled. Two intelligence officials involved in procuring intercepts about the ICC said the prime minister’s office took a keen interest in their work. Netanyahu’s office, one said, would send “areas of interests” and “instructions” in relation to the monitoring of court officials. Another described the prime minister as “obsessed” with intercepts shedding light on the activities of the ICC. Hacked emails and monitored calls Five sources familiar with Israel’s intelligence activities said it routinely spied on the phone calls made by Bensouda and her staff with Palestinians. Blocked by Israel from accessing Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, the ICC was forced to conduct much of its research by telephone, which made it more susceptible to surveillance. Thanks to their comprehensive access to Palestinian telecoms infrastructure, the sources said, intelligence operatives could capture the calls without installing spyware on the ICC official’s devices. “If Fatou Bensouda spoke to any person in the West Bank or Gaza, then that phone call would enter [intercept] systems,” one source said. Another said there was no hesitation internally over spying on the prosecutor, adding: “With Bensouda, she’s black and African, so who cares?” The surveillance system did not capture calls between ICC officials and anyone outside Palestine. However, multiple sources said the system required the active selection of the overseas phone numbers of ICC officials whose calls Israeli intelligence agencies decided to listen to. According to one Israeli source, a large whiteboard in an Israeli intelligence department contained the names of about 60 people under surveillance – half of them Palestinians and half from other countries, including UN officials and ICC personnel. In The Hague, Bensouda and her senior staff were alerted by security advisers and via diplomatic channels that Israel was monitoring their work. A former senior ICC official recalled: “We were made aware they were trying to get information on where we were with the preliminary examination.” Officials also became aware of specific threats against a prominent Palestinian NGO, Al-Haq, which was one of several Palestinian human rights groups that frequently submitted information to the ICC inquiry, often in lengthy documents detailing incidents it wanted the prosecutor to consider. The Palestinian Authority submitted similar dossiers. The Al-Haq office in Ramallah, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, in 2021. Photograph: Mohamad Torokman/Reuters Such documents often contained sensitive information such as testimony from potential witnesses. Al-Haq’s submissions are also understood to have linked specific allegations of Rome statute crimes to senior officials, including chiefs of the IDF, directors of the Shin Bet, and defence ministers such as Benny Gantz. Years later, after the ICC had opened a full investigation into the Palestine case, Gantz designated Al-Haq and five other Palestinian rights groups as “terrorist organisations”, a label that was rejected by multiple European states and later found by the CIA to be unsupported by evidence. The organisations said the designations were a “targeted assault” against those most actively engaging with the ICC. According to multiple current and former intelligence officials, military cyber-offensive teams and the Shin Bet both systematically monitored the employees of Palestinian NGOs and the Palestinian Authority who were engaging with the ICC. Two intelligence sources described how Israeli operatives hacked into the emails of Al-Haq and other groups communicating with Bensouda’s office. One of the sources said the Shin Bet even installed Pegasus spyware, developed by the private-sector NSO Group, on the phones of multiple Palestinian NGO employees, as well as two senior Palestinian Authority officials. Keeping tabs on the Palestinian submissions to the ICC’s inquiry was viewed as part of the Shin Bet’s mandate, but some army officials were concerned that spying on a foreign civilian entity crossed a line, as it had little to do with military operations. “It has nothing to do with Hamas, it has nothing to do with stability in the West Bank,” one military source said of the ICC surveillance. Another added: “We used our resources to spy on Fatou Bensouda – this isn’t something legitimate to do as military intelligence.” Secret meetings with the ICC Legitimate or otherwise, the surveillance of the ICC and Palestinians making the case for prosecutions against Israelis provided the Israeli government with an advantage in a secret back channel it had opened with the prosecutor’s office. Israel’s meetings with the ICC were highly sensitive: if made public, they had the potential to undermine the government’s official position that it did not recognise the court’s authority. According to six sources familiar with the meetings, they consisted of a delegation of top government lawyers and diplomats who travelled to The Hague. Two of the sources said the meetings were authorised by Netanyahu. The Israeli delegation was drawn from the justice ministry, foreign ministry and the military advocate general’s office. The meetings took place between 2017 and 2019, and were led by the prominent Israeli lawyer and diplomat Tal Becker. “In the beginning it was tense,” recalled a former ICC official. “We would get into details of specific incidents. We’d say: ‘We’re receiving allegations about these attacks, these killings,’ and they would provide us with information.” Tal Becker at the ICJ in January. Photograph: Hollandse Hoogte/REX/Shutterstock A person with direct knowledge of Israel’s preparation for the back-channel meetings said officials in the justice ministry were furnished with intelligence that had been gleaned from Israeli surveillance intercepts before delegations arrived at The Hague. “The lawyers who dealt with the issue at the justice ministry had a big thirst for intelligence information,” they said. For the Israelis, the back-channel meetings, while sensitive, presented a unique opportunity to directly present legal arguments challenging the prosecutor’s jurisdiction over the Palestinian territories. They also sought to convince the prosecutor that, despite the Israeli military’s highly questionable record of investigating wrongdoing in its ranks, it had robust procedures for holding its armed forces to account. This was a critical issue for Israel. A core ICC principle, known as complementarity, prevents the prosecutor from investigating or trying individuals if they are the subject of credible state-level investigations or criminal proceedings. Israeli surveillance operatives were asked to find out which specific incidents might form part of a future ICC prosecution, multiple sources said, in order to enable Israeli investigative bodies to “open investigations retroactively” in the same cases. “If materials were transferred to the ICC, we had to understand exactly what they were, to ensure that the IDF investigated them independently and sufficiently so that they could claim complementarity,” one source explained. Israel’s back-channel meetings with the ICC ended in December 2019, when Bensouda, announcing the end of her preliminary examination, said she believed there was a “reasonable basis” to conclude that Israel and Palestinian armed groups had both committed war crimes in the occupied territories. Bensouda made clear in December 2019 she intended to open a full investigation. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images It was a significant setback for Israel’s leaders, although it could have been worse. In a move that some in the government regarded as a partial vindication of Israel’s lobbying efforts, Bensouda stopped short of launching a formal investigation. Instead, she announced she would ask a panel of ICC judges to rule on the contentious question of the court’s jurisdiction over the Palestinian territories, due to “unique and highly contested legal and factual issues”. Yet Bensouda had made clear she was minded to open a full investigation if the judges gave her the green light. It was against this backdrop that Israel ramped up its campaign against the ICC and turned to its top spy chief to turn up the heat on Bensouda personally. Personal threats and a ‘smear campaign’ Between late 2019 and early 2021, as the pre-trial chamber considered the jurisdictional questions, the director of the Mossad, Yossi Cohen, intensified his efforts to persuade Bensouda not to proceed with the investigation. Cohen’s contacts with Bensouda – which were described to the Guardian by four people familiar with the prosecutor’s contemporaneous accounts of the interactions, as well as sources briefed on the Mossad operation – had begun several years earlier. In one of the earliest encounters, Cohen surprised Bensouda when he made an unexpected appearance at an official meeting the prosecutor was holding with the then DRC president, Joseph Kabila, in a New York hotel suite. Joseph Kabila at a news conference in Kinshasa in 2018. Photograph: Kenny-Katombe Butunka/Reuters Sources familiar with the meeting said that after Bensouda’s staff were asked to leave the room, the director of the Mossad suddenly appeared from behind a door in a carefully choreographed “ambush”. After the incident in New York, Cohen persisted in contacting the prosecutor, turning up unannounced and subjecting her to unwanted calls. While initially amicable, the sources said, Cohen’s behaviour became increasingly threatening and intimidating. A close ally of Netanyahu at the time, Cohen was a veteran Mossad spymaster and had gained a reputation within the service as a skilled recruiter of agents with experience cultivating high-level officials in foreign governments. Accounts of his secret meetings with Bensouda paint a picture in which he sought to “build a relationship” with the prosecutor as he attempted to dissuade her from pursuing an investigation that, if it went ahead, could embroil senior Israeli officials. Three sources briefed on Cohen’s activities said they understood the spy chief had tried to recruit Bensouda into complying with Israel’s demands during the period in which she was waiting for a ruling from the pre-trial chamber. They said he became more threatening after he began to realise the prosecutor would not be persuaded to abandon the investigation. At one stage, Cohen is said to have made comments about Bensouda’s security and thinly veiled threats about the consequences for her career if she proceeded. Contacted by the Guardian, Cohen and Kabila did not respond to requests for comment. Bensouda declined to comment. Cohen was seen as trying to ‘build a relationship’ with the prosecutor as he attempted to dissuade her from pursuing the investigation. Photograph: Corinna Kern/Reuters When she was prosecutor, Bensouda formally disclosed her encounters with Cohen to a small group within the ICC, with the intention of putting on record her belief that she had been “personally threatened”, sources familiar with the disclosures said. This was not the only way Israel sought to place pressure on the prosecutor. At around the same time, ICC officials discovered details of what sources described as a diplomatic “smear campaign”, relating in part to a close family member. According to multiple sources, the Mossad had obtained a cache of material including transcripts of an apparent sting operation against Bensouda’s husband. The origins of the material – and whether it was genuine – remain unclear. However, elements of the information were circulated by Israel among western diplomatic officials, sources said, in a failed attempt to discredit the chief prosecutor. A person briefed on the campaign said it gained little traction among diplomats and amounted to a desperate attempt to “besmirch” Bensouda’s reputation. Trump’s campaign against the ICC In March 2020, three months after Bensouda referred the Palestine case to the pre-trial chamber, an Israeli government delegation reportedly held discussions in Washington with senior US officials about “a joint Israeli-American struggle” against the ICC. One Israeli intelligence official said they regarded Donald Trump’s administration as more cooperative than that of his Democratic predecessor. The Israelis felt sufficiently comfortable to ask for information from US intelligence about Bensouda, a request the source said would have been “impossible” during Barack Obama’s tenure. Trump and Netanyahu before the signing of the Abraham accords at the White House in 2020. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images Days before the meetings in Washington, Bensouda had received authorisation from the ICC’s judges to pursue a separate investigation into war crimes in Afghanistan committed by the Taliban and both Afghan and US military personnel. Fearing US armed forces would be prosecuted, the Trump administration was engaged in its own aggressive campaign against the ICC, culminating in the summer of 2020 with the imposition of US economic sanctions on Bensouda and one of her top officials. Among ICC officials, the US-led financial and visa restrictions on court personnel were believed to relate as much to the Palestine investigation as to the Afghanistan case. Two former ICC officials said senior Israeli officials had expressly indicated to them that Israel and the US were working together. At a press conference in June that year, senior Trump administration figures signalled their intention to impose sanctions on ICC officials, announcing they had received unspecified information about “financial corruption and malfeasance at the highest levels of the office of the prosecutor”. As well as referring to the Afghanistan case, Mike Pompeo, Trump’s secretary of state, linked the US measures to the Palestine case. “It’s clear the ICC is only putting Israel in [its] crosshairs for nakedly political purposes,” he said. Months later, Pompeo accused Bensouda of having “engaged in corrupt acts for her personal benefit”. The US has never publicly provided any information to substantiate that charge, and Joe Biden lifted the sanctions months after he entered the White House. Mike Pompeo at a joint news conference on the ICC sanctions in June 2020. Photograph: Yuri Gripas/AFP/Getty Images But at the time Bensouda faced increasing pressure from an apparently concerted effort behind the scenes by the two powerful allies. As a Gambian national, she did not enjoy the political protection that other ICC colleagues from western countries had by virtue of their citizenship. A former ICC source said this left her “vulnerable and isolated”. Cohen’s activities, sources said, were particularly concerning for the prosecutor and led her to fear for her personal safety. When the pre-trial chamber finally confirmed the ICC had jurisdiction in Palestine in February 2021, some at the ICC even believed Bensouda should leave the final decision to open a full investigation to her successor. On 3 March, however, months before the end of her nine-year term, Bensouda announced a full investigation in the Palestine case, setting in motion a process that could lead to criminal charges, though she cautioned the next phase could take time. “Any investigation undertaken by the office will be conducted independently, impartially and objectively, without fear or favour,” she said. “To both Palestinian and Israeli victims and affected communities, we urge patience.” Khan announces arrest warrants When Khan took the helm at the ICC prosecutor’s office in June 2021, he inherited an investigation he later said “lies on the San Andreas fault of international politics and strategic interests”. As he took office, other investigations – including on events in the Philippines, DRC, Afghanistan and Bangladesh – competed for his attention, and in March 2022, days after Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, he opened a high-profile investigation into alleged Russian war crimes. Initially, the politically sensitive Palestine inquiry was not treated as a priority by the British prosecutor’s team, sources familiar with the case said. One said it was in effect “on the shelf” – but Khan’s office disputes this and says it established a dedicated investigative team to take the inquiry forward. In Israel, the government’s top lawyers regarded Khan – who had previously defended warlords such as the former Liberian president Charles Taylor – as a more cautious prosecutor than Bensouda. One former senior Israeli official said there was “lots of respect” for Khan, unlike for his predecessor. His appointment to the court was viewed as a “reason for optimism”, they said, but they added that the 7 October attack “changed that reality”. The Hamas assault on southern Israel, in which Palestinian militants killed nearly 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped about 250 people, clearly involved brazen war crimes. So, too, in the view of many legal experts, has Israel’s subsequent onslaught on Gaza, which is estimated to have killed more than 35,000 people and brought the territory to the brink of famine through Israel’s obstruction of humanitarian aid. By the end of the third week of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, Khan was on the ground at the Rafah border crossing. He subsequently made visits to the West Bank and southern Israel, where he was invited to meet survivors of the 7 October attack and the relatives of people who had been killed. In February 2024, Khan issued a strongly worded statement that Netanyahu’s legal advisers interpreted as an ominous sign. In the post on X, he in effect warned Israel against launching an assault on Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city, where more than 1 million displaced people were sheltering at the time. “I am deeply concerned by the reported bombardment and potential ground incursion by Israeli forces in Rafah,” he wrote. “Those who do not comply with the law should not complain later when my office takes action.” Children standing amid the rubble of a building in Rafah that was destroyed by Israeli airstrikes in February. Photograph: Mohammed Abed/AFP/Getty Images The comments stirred alarm within the Israeli government as they appeared to deviate from his previous statements about the war, which officials had viewed as reassuringly cautious. “That tweet surprised us a lot,” a senior official said. Concerns in Israel over Khan’s intentions escalated last month when the government briefed the media that it believed the prosecutor was contemplating arrest warrants against Netanyahu and other senior officials such as Yoav Gallant. Israeli intelligence had intercepted emails, attachments and text messages from Khan and other officials in his office. “The subject of the ICC climbed the ladder of priorities for Israeli intelligence,” one intelligence source said. It was via intercepted communications that Israel established that Khan was at one stage considering entering Gaza through Egypt and wanted urgent assistance doing so “without Israel’s permission”. Another Israeli intelligence assessment, circulated widely in the intelligence community, drew on surveillance of a call between two Palestinian politicians. One of them said Khan had indicated that a request for arrest warrants of Israeli leaders could be imminent, but warned he was “under tremendous pressure from the United States”. It was against this backdrop that Netanyahu made a series of public statements warning a request for arrest warrants could be imminent. He called on “the leaders of the free world to stand firmly against the ICC” and “use all the means at their disposal to stop this dangerous move”. He added: “Branding Israel’s leaders and soldiers as war criminals will pour jet fuel on the fires of antisemitism.” In Washington, a group of senior US Republican senators had already sent a threatening letter to Khan with a clear warning: “Target Israel and we will target you.” Netanyahu (left) and Yoav Gallant during a press conference in Tel Aviv in October. Photograph: Reuters The ICC, meanwhile, has strengthened its security with regular sweeps of the prosecutor’s offices, security checks on devices, phone-free areas, weekly threat assessments and the introduction of specialist equipment. An ICC spokesperson said Khan’s office had been subjected to “several forms of threats and communications that could be viewed as attempts to unduly influence its activities”. Khan recently disclosed in an interview with CNN that some elected leaders had been “very blunt” with him as he prepared to issue arrest warrants. “‘This court is built for Africa and for thugs like Putin,’ is was what a senior leader told me.” Despite the pressure, Khan, like his predecessor in the prosecutor’s office, chose to press ahead. Last week, Khan announced he was seeking arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant alongside three Hamas leaders for war crimes and crimes against humanity. He said Israel’s prime minister and defence minister stood accused of responsibility for extermination, starvation, the denial of humanitarian relief supplies and deliberate targeting of civilians. Standing at a lectern with two of his top prosecutors – one American, the other British – at his side, Khan said he had repeatedly told Israel to take urgent action to comply with humanitarian law. “I specifically underlined that starvation as a method of war and the denial of humanitarian relief constitute Rome statute offences. I could not have been clearer,” he said. “As I also repeatedly underlined in my public statements, those who do not comply with the law should not complain later when my office takes action. That day has come.” · Copyright 2024 The Guardian © 2024 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. (dcr)

The U.N. says criminal gang violence in Haiti has displaced more than 300,000 children since March By Coral Murphy Marcos | AP July 2, 2024 at 12:04 a.m. EDT FILE - A server ladles soup into a container as children line up to receive food at a shelter for families displaced by gang violence, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, March 14, 2024. Gang violence in Haiti has displaced over 300,000 children since March, according to a new report from the U.N. children’s agency released late Tuesday, July 2, as the Caribbean country struggles to curb killings and kidnappings. (AP Photo/Odelyn Joseph, File) SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — Gang violence in Haiti has displaced more than 300,000 children since March, the U.N. children’s agency said Tuesday as the Caribbean country struggles to curb killings and kidnappings. Children are more than half of the nearly 580,000 people who have become homeless in the last four months. The spike in violence began in late February after a series of coordinated attacks on key government infrastructure eventually led Prime Minister Ariel Henry to resign in April. “The humanitarian catastrophe unfolding before our eyes is taking a devastating toll on children,” Catherine Russell, UNICEF’s executive director, said in a statement. “Displaced children are in desperate need of a safe and protective environment, and increased support and funding from the international community.” Gangs now control at least 80% of the capital Port-au-Prince and the key roads leading in and out of it, with more than 2,500 people killed or injured across the country in the first three months of the year, according to the U.N. Many children are living in makeshift shelters, including schools that are in poor hygienic conditions, placing them at risk of disease. School closures are also leading to a higher dropout rate. The agency said children in Haiti are being forced to join violent gangs to survive as they often lack access to food, health care, clean water and sanitation. Displaced children and teenagers in Haiti also face a higher risk of sexual assault, exploitation, abuse and family separation, according to UNICEF. The announcement comes days after hundreds of Kenyans arrived in Haiti to help rescue the country from the tight hold of armed gangs. The deployment received mixed reactions after a U.N. peacekeeping mission years ago introduced cholera in the country and was tainted with sexual allegations. On Monday, U.S. Deputy National Security Adviser Jonathan Finer met with Haitian Prime Minister Garry Conille to discuss the initial deployment of the U.N.-backed mission to Haiti. Finer reminded Conille of the United States’ strong support for accountability and oversight mechanisms as part of mission. Haiti is also bracing for a strong hurricane season, which started earlier than usual. A tropical storm watch was in effect for Haiti’s southern coast as Hurricane Beryl moved into the Caribbean Sea. © 1996-2024 The Washington Post