OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Palestinian lawyer Salah Hamouri, who is in Israeli detention, filed
a complaint in France Tuesday against surveillance firm
NSO Group for having
“illegally infiltrated” his mobile phone with the spyware Pegasus.
اضافة اعلان
Hamouri, who also
holds French citizenship, is serving a four-month term of administrative
detention ordered by an Israeli military court in March on the claim he is a
“threat to security”.
He is one of
several Palestinian activists whose phones were hacked using the
Pegasus malware made by the Israeli company NSO, according to a report in November by
human rights groups.
The organizations
had tested the phones of members of six Palestinian non-government groups that
Israel has named as terrorist organizations, including prisoner advocacy group
Addameer, where Hamouri worked.
The groups
concluded that six Palestinian activists working for the outlawed organizations
had been hacked by Pegasus.
On Tuesday, the
International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), the
Human Rights League (LDH)
and Hamouri filed a complaint with the Paris prosecutor.
It accused NSO of
“having illegally infiltrated the telephone of rights defender Salah Hamouri,”
they said in a statement sent to the AFP bureau in Jerusalem.
“Obviously, this
is an operation that is part of a largely political framework given the
harassment Hamouri has been subjected to for years and the attacks on human
rights defenders in Israel,” attorney Patrick Baudouin, honorary president of
the FIDH, told AFP.
The rights groups
have filed a complaint alleging offenses — such as the violation of privacy and
correspondence — to the prosecutor of the Paris judicial court in the hopes of
spurring a judicial investigation.
Baudouin said
Hamouri holds French nationality and that his phone was allegedly infected with
Pegasus prior to his travel to France from April to May 2021, which would make
French courts “competent” to judge the case.
NSO Group has
faced mounting scrutiny since a consortium of news outlets revealed in July
last year that its
Pegasus software had been used to spy on the phones of
journalists, politicians, activists; and business leaders in many countries.
Israel says
Hamouri is a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which
it and the EU consider a “terrorist” group.
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