Franco-Palestinian lawyer Salah Hamouri, currently detained by Israel, filed a complaint in France on Tuesday, April 6, against the Israeli cybersecurity company NSO for having “ illegally infiltrated his cell phone with Pegasus spyware.
The complaint, filed on Tuesday at the Paris prosecutor’s office by the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) and the League for Human Rights (LDH), follows revelations about Israeli spyware and its parent company NSO . According to the complainants, Salah Hamouri’s phone was spied on by Pegasus while he was in France, between April 27 and May 13, 2021.
In November 2021, the name of Salah Hamouri appears alongside five other Palestinian human rights defenders, as their phones are spied on by the notorious Pegasus spyware. According to the association Front Line Defendersin collaboration with Amnesty International and Citizen Lab, the lawyer’s phone has been hacked since April 2021.
A surveillance that begins in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, but continues when Salah Hamouri is in France, which constitutes, under French law, a violation of the right to respect for private life, reports our correspondent in Ramallah, Alice Froussard.
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Salah Hamouri in the sights of the Israeli authorities
For more than twenty years, the 36-year-old Franco-Palestinian lawyer, human rights defender and currently in administrative detention in Israel, has been the victim of persecution and is waging a battle with various Israeli institutions.
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He spent more than ten years in Israeli prisons, suffered several travel bans, had to pay bail and exorbitant fines before being placed under house arrest. His permanent residence in Jerusalem was also revoked. The Jewish state accuses him of being a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), an organization considered ” terrorist by the Jewish state, which he denies.
In a press release, FIDH specifies that these attacks against Salah Hamouri are part of ” a broader campaign by the Israeli government to delegitimize Palestinian human rights groups and defenders by associating them with terrorists, and by exerting pressure on those who give them a platform and actively working to block their sources of funding “.
Human rights organizations hope for the opening of a judicial investigation, because, according to his lawyer, this cyber espionage is ” politics, given the harassment to which Salah Hamouri has been subjected for years and given the attacks on human rights defenders in Israel “.
This complaint is in addition to dozens of others filed for its unlawful use of technology in violation of human rights rights and principles, including two filed by digital giants Meta – formerly Facebook – and Apple.
► Read also: Pegasus: the spyware used against six Palestinians, officials and activists
(And with agencies)