Israel blocks Spain’s judicial investigation into Pegasus spyware scandal

Spain’s justice system has run into a massive wall: Israel. Judge José Luis Calama, of the Audiencia Nacional high court, stated that Israel has blocked the investigation into a spying case against several members of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s government using a spyware called Pegasus, marketed and developed by an Israeli company. The probe found preliminary evidence of crimes involving the disclosure of secrets, which “jeopardized the security of the Spanish State.”

Israel has ignored five requests for cooperation from the judge, who harshly criticized the country’s “non-compliance” with international obligations that were ratified by Israel. “It prevents us from advancing in the investigation of the facts,” Calama stated in a document signed this Thursday, where he explains that he is forced to close the case for the second time due to a lack of new leads.

In May 2022, the Spanish high court began an investigation into alleged hacking of the mobile phones of President Pedro Sánchez and Defense Minister Margarita Robles.

Pegasus can take control of a cellphone without its owner noticing and, in addition to accessing all its contents, it can also turn it into a listening and image capture terminal. Other countries, including France and Mexico, launched investigations after detecting similar attacks.

The “Pegasus case” was later expanded after detecting further alleged attacks against the phones of the ministers of the Interior and Agriculture, Fernando Grande-Marlaska and Luis Planas, respectively. According to the case file, the prime minister’s phone was infected five times between October 2020 and December 2021; in May 2021, hackers managed to extract up to 2.57 gigabytes of information from his device. Robles’ phone was attacked four times between May and October 2021; Marlaska’s, twice (in June 2021); and Planas’s, once (also in June 2021).

Since then, Judge Calama has been trying, unsuccessfully, to find out who was behind the hack. The investigation has run into a complete lack of cooperation from Israel, where NSO Group, the technology company that developed the spyware, is headquartered. “The failure to execute the letters rogatory [requests for cooperation] addressed to the Israeli authorities prevents us from investigating [...] Inevitably leading us to a provisional dismissal,” the judge wrote, underscoring the Israeli government’s “manifest breach of its international obligations.”

For almost four years, the investigating judge has tried to obtain a response from Israel. The first request for cooperation was issued on May 10, 2022, when Israeli authorities were asked to compel NSO Group to hand over certain information. On June 7 of the same year, permission was requested for a judicial commission to travel to Israel to question the company’s CEO. Given the lack of response, the high court reiterated its request in September 2022 and April 2023. “To date, no acknowledgment of receipt or any other response has been received,” the judge emphasized this Thursday.

This lack of cooperation led the judge to shelve the case for the first time in July 2023 due to “lack of a known perpetrator” and the impossibility of continuing his probe. However, in April 2024 he reopened the case after receiving information from France about similar investigations launched there in 2021 concerning several hacks of the phones of French journalists, lawyers, and members of the government and parliament with the same spyware. In February 2025, Calama again requested assistance from Israel, but his request was once more ignored.

The judge notes that Israel is violating several international agreements it has signed, such as the 1959 European Convention on Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters, which it ratified in 1967; and the Second Additional Protocol to the European Convention on Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters, which it signed in 2006. “In the present case, it is proven that the State of Israel does not provide Spain with a level of cooperation equivalent to that received in substantially similar cases, by not responding to the multiple requests issued in this case, without any legal basis or offering of alternative assistance mechanisms,” Calama points out.

Calama added that such behavior “breaks the balance inherent in international cooperation and violates the principle of good faith that should govern relations between States.”

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