How Israel is weaponising everyday tech into terror devices

And why you will never be safe again.

Some absolutely remarkable things have happened lately — since September 17 of last year, to be exact. That was when Israel carried out a barbaric terror campaign in Lebanon as it weaponised communication devices — pagers and walkie-talkies — to kill dozens and maim hundreds of Hezbollah officials and ordinary citizens with no ties to the Lebanese resistance. It’s an act so depraved that even the former CIA chief Leon Panetta called it terrorism in no uncertain terms, “I don’t think there’s any question that it’s a form of terrorism.”

Yet, instead of feeling any sense of guilt or moral quandary about it, the Israelis — and their supporters — have since gone on to gloat about that unhinged act of terror at every opportunity possible. “Where’s your beeper/pager?” or some variant of this line has become a something of a favourite of genocidal Zionists in encounters online and offline. Betar, a rabidly Zionist organisation with a sordid past of terrorism in Palestine openly tweeted to a pro-Palestine activist a death threat in the following words, “1800 dollars to anyone who hands that jihadi a beeper.” One terrorism sympathiser told a journalist, “I hope your beeper doesn’t go off”, on live TV. A minister in the Netanyahu government tweeted a similar threat to the founder of the Hind Rajab Foundation: “Watch your pager.” Deborah Lipstadt, who was Biden’s Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Antisemitism, rhetorically asked an interviewer, “You want a beeper?” while answering his question about Israel not being weaker in the aftermath of October 7. She was roundly applauded and cheered for her supposedly funny/clever remark at the pro-Israel event.

This ghastly rhetoric has now taken the form of practical jokes that only bloodthirsty Zionists find funny. Recently, one pro-Israel fanatic from Betar, ran up to Norman Finkelstein and dropped a pager in his pocket, telling him, “Here’s your pager, Norman.”

It’s not a surprise that these terrorism sympathisers don’t feel any contrition for their favourite terror state’s barbarism since that terrorist act has been celebrated in the western media as an act of extraordinary espionage, “a daring and sophisticated deception in the history of counterintelligence”, “a modern take on the Trojan Horse”, and a script straight out of a Bond film, among other things. This celebration of terrorism by the western media apparatus had its logical conclusion when 60 Minutes ran a glowing segment in which it interviewed two of the Mossad men behind the terror attack and lionised their criminal undertaking that potentially put thousands of innocent civilians, with no ties to Hezbollah, at risk.

This gloating reached its apotheosis when Netanyahu gave Trump two samples — one golden and the other regular — of the rigged Gold Apollo pagers, which were weaponised against Hezbollah, during his recent visit to Washington. One interpretation of Netanyahu’s gesture is an implicit threat to Trump (“Do as we say or else you’ll soon get a real pager”), the other is the celebration of a successful terror attack. Both possibilities are deeply disturbing.

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Israeli companies have a long history of weaponising technology to serve the country’s nefarious ends. Since all of the Israeli spyware companies are founded by veterans of some of the most notorious intelligence units of the Israeli army, the most famous of which is the Unit 8200, and their operations are regulated by Israel’s Ministry of Defence, their actions, simply put, are backed by the state of Israel.

Just last month, news broke that Graphite, a spyware tool created by the Israeli company Paragon Solutions (founded by the former Israeli prime minister and Jeffrey Epstein associate Ehud Barak), was used to target “nearly 100 journalists and other members of civil society” through their WhatsApp accounts. These attacks were “zero-click”, meaning the victims’ phones were taken complete control of without the users clicking any malicious links over email, text, or WhatsApp.

The Guardian reported that Paragon Solutions deals exclusively with states, not private individuals, and that its clients include US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), among other state institutions. The Italian government, one of Paragon’s clients, promptly terminated its contract after the news came to light. The Italian state was using the Israeli spyware tool to target journalists critical of the Giorgia Meloni government.

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Graphite is similar to the more infamous Pegasus spyware developed by the Israeli cyber-intelligence firm NSO Group. Pegasus was in the spotlight about five years ago when it was revealed to have infected the devices of political leaders, dissidents, activists, and journalists in several countries. A later investigation revealed that the malware was used to target over 50,000 individuals worldwide.

A New York Times profile of NSO Group written by two award-winning Mossad stenographers calls the company “the crown jewel of the Israeli defense industry” for its ability to “almost instantly transform phones around the world into powerful surveillance tools” and which is capable of taking “control of its camera and microphone.”

The NYT article goes on to state how the self-proclaimed Jewish state maintains near-total control over who the tool is sold to by its makers and how that power is weaponised into advancing Israeli interests globally:

Israel, through its internal export-licensing process, has ultimate say over who NSO can sell its spyware to. This has allowed Israel to make NSO a central component of its national-security strategy for years, using it and similar firms to advance the country’s interests around the world.

And this weaponisation has had the intended impact. Israel has leveraged its control over NSO to shift the stances of several countries in its favour on the global stage. Per the NYT article:

Countries like Mexico and Panama have shifted their positions toward Israel in key votes at the United Nations after winning access to Pegasus.

Stunningly, the article further reveals that the sale of Pegasus was used as a negotiation tool in the Abraham Accords — through which four Arab states (the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan) normalised their ties with Israel during Trump’s first term in what Netanyahu termed “the deal of the century”:

Times reporting also reveals how sales of Pegasus played an unseen but critical role in securing the support of Arab nations in Israel’s campaign against Iran and even in negotiating the Abraham Accords, the 2020 diplomatic agreements that normalized relations between Israel and some of its longtime Arab adversaries.

[B]y the time the Abraham Accords were announced, Israel had provided licenses to sell Pegasus to nearly all the signatories.

Bahraini and Emirati officials with Trump and Netanyahu at the signing of the Abraham Accords.

While NSO Group’s aggressive tool has been used to sway government policies at international forums, it has also been used as a powerful weapon against dissidents and other persons of interests. Two such cases are instructive.

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Sometime in 2018, Mohammed Bin Salman (better known as MBS), the crown prince and de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, sent a WhatsApp message to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. The attached video had a hidden spyware that exfiltrated copious personal data — including amorous messages, selfies, and nudes — from Bezos’s phone and found their way to the American tabloid, the National Enquirer. In January 2019, the National Enquirer published details of the then-married Bezos’s extramarital affair with TV presenter Lauren Sanchez. This invasion of privacy prompted the Amazon boss to hire a personal sleuth to find out the source of the messages and photos in the Enquirer story. Threatened by where Bezos’s investigations could potentially lead, the tabloid attempted to extort Bezos with publication of even more explicit images if he didn’t abort his sleuthing operation. Bezos didn’t buckle down and published the Enquirer’s extortion letter in a blog post in February that year.

Subsequent analysis of the evidence of surveillance on Bezos’s phone by two United Nations special rapporteurs revealed that the Saudi prince had deployed Pegasus to hack Bezos’s phone.

But why did Saudi Arabia need to hack into Bezos’s phone and extort him? The Saudi crown prince went about his unholy expedition in a bid to stop the Bezos-owned Washington Post from reporting on the murder of the Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi, who used to write columns for the paper.

Khashoggi, a Saudi national, was critical of MBS’s policies in his articles, much to the chagrin of the crown prince. When in early October 2018 Khashoggi went inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to obtain necessary documents for his impending marriage with Turkish fiancée Hatice Cengiz, MBS saw his opportunity. Waiting for Khashoggi inside the consulate were assassins sent by MBS. They killed him, dismembered him with a bone saw, and burned his body in a large oven “over a period of three days”.

United Nations special rapporteur Agnes Callamard termed it “a brutal and premeditated killing, planned and perpetrated by officials of the state of Saudi Arabia”.

The Washington Post wouldn’t let go of the sordid murder and its all too obvious link to MBS. The crown prince saw blackmailing Bezos with proof of his infidelity and incriminating nudes as one way to kill the Post’s reporting. But it ended up revealing way more than what the crown prince intended.

Interestingly, Saudi Arabia had used Pegasus to spy on Khashoggi and trace his whereabouts before his murder. According to the UN report, “The hacking of Mr. Bezos’ phone occurred during a period, May-June 2018, in which the phones of three close associates of Jamal Khashoggi, Yahya Assiri, Omar Abdulaziz and Ghanem Al Masarir were also hacked, allegedly using the Pegasus malware.”

Saudi Arabia first bought Pegasus from NSO Group in November 2017.

So in this sordid tale of murder and extortion, MBS used NSO Group’s Pegasus first as a weapon to spy on his murder target and then for a second time to spy on Bezos to kill the negative coverage that the murder brought on its perpetrator.

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In November 2019, the Indian Supreme Court (the highest court in the land) was to give one of the most important judgements in its history. It had to decide if the 2.77 acres of land on which the centuries-old Babri Masjid stood before being razed to the ground by a mob of extremist Hindus on December 6, 1992 , belonged to the Muslims (who possessed deeds to the land going back centuries and had the physical mosque on the ground until very recently to prove their claims) or the Hindus (who had the fantastical story of a likely temple being brought down to build the mosque in its stead by the first Mughal ruler, Babar, in 1528).

Babri Masjid being destroyed by Hindu mobs on December 6, 1992.

The case had dragged on in lower courts for decades before it finally moved to the Supreme Court with a government mandate to expedite hearings and the final verdict. In a preposterous judgement that defied all legal norms, on November 9, 2019, the five-judge bench of the court decided the case in favour of the Hindus, despite describing the criminal demolition of the mosque as an “egregious violation of the rule of law.” In its twisted interpretation of justice, the court awarded Muslims another parcel of land to build their mosque in a nearby locality.

In April 2019 — six months before the landmark judgement — a female staffer of Ranjan Gogoi, the Chief Justice of India (the top judge of the Supreme Court, the highest court in the land), had accused him of sexual harassment. In a kangaroo court of three judges hastily convened by Gogoi, including himself as one of the three judges, Gogoi had absolved himself of any wrongdoing, much to the dismay of the legal fraternity in India.

Two years later this sequence of ludicrous events started to make sense.

In 2021, an Indian outlet revealed that 11 phone numbers belonging to the woman staffer and her relatives were put on surveillance by an Indian government agency soon after she levelled accusations against the Indian chief justice.

Pegasus, the same software which was implanted on Bezos’s phone by MBS, was utilised in this case as well. The Indian outlet didn’t name the official or the agency that surveilled the female staffer and her relatives’ phones, but it did reveal that NSO Group, the developer of Pegasus, was contracted to the Indian government. It is safe to assume that the kompromat collected from the surveilled phones was used to blackmail Gogoi into giving the verdict the government wanted. In an obvious case of quid pro quo, soon after his judicial retirement Gogoi was appointed to the upper chamber of the Indian parliament by the rabidly right-wing Hindu government which had for years promised the Indian Hindu electorate to build a temple where Babri Masjid once stood.

For the Indian government, which is the top buyer of Israeli weapons, Pegasus came in handy towards the fulfilment of its long-cherished dream and electoral promise.

It also helped Israel change India’s position in its favour at the UN. The aforementioned New York Times article states, “[I]n June 2019, India voted in support of Israel at the U.N.’s Economic and Social Council to deny observer status to a Palestinian human rights organization, a first for the nation.”

India had a long history of taking pro-Palestine positions at the UN, but the Narendra Modi-led right-wing Indian government is fast becoming a trusted Israel ally at international forums — helped undoubtedly by the weaponisation of a powerful spyware tool, as seen in the case of Gogoi.

So you are selling me Pegasus, right? Right?

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While Paragon Solutions and NSO Group’s tech has thus far only targeted smartphones. There’s an even more invasive Israeli tech company, which has been rarely covered in the media.

Toka, another Israeli tech firm founded by Ehud Barak — the former Israeli PM with close ties to convicted pedophile Epstein — and veterans of Unit 8200, has built tools that it claims are capable of hacking any device connected to the internet.

In a 2020 article, Whitney Webb (who has written a stunning two-part voluminous book on the history of the use of blackmail and the deep influence of Israel and Israel-linked firms in the American political and technology landscape) writes:

Toka launched with plans to “provide spy tools for whatever device its clients require,” including not only smartphones but a “special focus on the so-called Internet of Things (IoT).” Per the company, this includes devices like Amazon Echo, Google Nest-connected home products, as well as connected fridges, thermostats and alarms. Exploits in these products discovered by Toka, the company said at the time, would not be disclosed to vendors, meaning those flaws would continue to remain vulnerable to any hacker, whether a client of Toka or not.

In her article, Webb goes on to highlight Toka’s extensive ties to the Israeli state — links that are even more pervasive than those of NSO Group:

The company’s activities are concerning in light of the fact that Toka has been directly partnered with Israel’s Ministry of Defense and other Israeli intelligence and security agencies since its founding. The company “works closely” with these government agencies, according to an Israeli Ministry of Defense website. This collaboration, per Toka, is meant to “enhance” their products. Toka’s direct IDF links are in contrast to the NSO Group, a company that does not maintain overt ties with the Israeli security state.

Toka’s direct collaboration with Israel’s government is also made clear through its claim that it sells its products and offers its services only to “trusted” governments, law enforcement agencies and intelligence agencies. Toka’s [former CEO Yaron] Rosen has stated that Russia, China, and “other enemy countries” would never be customers of the company. In other words, only countries aligned with Israeli policy goals, particularly in occupied Palestine, are permitted to be customers and gain access to its trove of powerful hacking tools. This is consistent with Israeli government efforts to leverage Israel’s hi-tech sector as a means of countering the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) movement globally.

Further evidence that Toka is part of this Israeli government effort to seed foreign governments with technology products deeply tied to Israel’s military and intelligence services is the fact that one of the main investors in Toka is Dell Technologies Capital, which is an extension of the well-known tech company Dell. Dell was founded by Michael Dell, a well-known pro-Israel partisan who has donated millions of dollars to the Friends of the IDF and is one of the top supporters of the so-called “anti-BDS” bills that prevent publicly employed individuals or public institutions in several U.S. states from supporting non-violent boycotts of Israel, even on humanitarian grounds. As MintPress previously noted, the fact that a major producer of consumer electronic goods is heavily investing in a company that markets the hacking of that very technology should be a red flag.

Ehud Barak with his face covered stepping inside an Epstein property. (Surely no one would know it’s Ehud?!)

While Pegasus transforms “phones around the world into powerful surveillance tools”, with Toka not just your phone but even your internet-enabled refrigerators, TVs, thermostats, and toasters can become Israel’s window into your life, to be potentially used as weapons when you step out of the line by participating in such things as a pro-Palestine rally, using watermelon emojis, or reading newsletters such as this one.

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Last month, The Times of Israel published a story with a remarkable lede, “Nearly half of all adults worldwide hold significant antisemitic views and younger people are more likely to discriminate against Jews, according to an Anti-Defamation League [ADL] survey released on Tuesday.”

Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the ADL goes on to describe the findings as a “global emergency.”

The ADL has a notorious history of finding antisemitism where none exists, thereby inflating its tally of antisemites disproportionately. It even counts pro-Palestine rallies as evidence of antisemitism. Since such rallies became commonplace as Israel carried out its genocidal war on the Palestinians in Gaza for over 15 months, it helped the ADL prop up its sketchy numbers even further.

It speaks volumes about the credibility of the ADL when it certified Elon Musk’s two successive Sieg Heils at Trump’s inauguration as “not a Nazi salute” but refers to “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” as an antisemitic chant.

Interestingly, the ADL’s functioning has also been questioned by a rabid Zionist media outlet. Tablet Magazine, in an article published in 2022, labelled the organisation “a soulless racket.”

Nevertheless, none of its open advocacy for genocide and terrorism — which only imperil the lives of Jews everywhere — has diminished the ADL’s standing in the eyes of its Israeli and Western backers since it works as a well-trained, ferocious attack dog ready to be unleased on anyone opposed to the Zionist project of extermination of Palestinians on their own land.

It’s this pseudo credibility which enables Greenblatt to openly talk about the “genius” pager attacks on Lebanese citizens as a weapon to counter antisemitism. “We need the kind of genius that manufactured Apollo Gold pagers and infiltrated Hezbollah for over a decade to prepare for this battle,” he recently said in a speech to Israel’s parliament. “This is the kind of ingenuity and inventiveness that have always been a hallmark of the state of Israel, that has always been the characteristic of the Jewish people. I know we can do it.”

Thank heavens, the ADL has a ready solution to counter the dreamed-up explosive rise of antisemites in the world: exploding pagers (and maybe other devices) in the real world!

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In his book The Wandering Who? A Study of Jewish Identity Politics, Israeli-British musician and writer Gilad Atzmon tells the story of Victor Ostrovsky, a deserter former Mossad agent who grew a conscience later in his life and divulged sordid details of Israel’s espionage operations, much to the chagrin of Israeli society.

Ostrovsky made some startling revelations in a book, in particular about the existence of “sayanim” which means assistants or helpers (singular: sayan). The sayanim, who must be 100 percent Jewish, are Israel’s assets in foreign countries who can be mobilised in an instant into doing things for the benefit of Israel.

Atzmon quotes the following passage from Ostrovsky’s 1990 book By Way of Deception about the way the sayanim work to advance Israeli interests from their native countries:

The next day Ran S. delivered a lecture on the savanim, a unique and important part of the Mossad’s operation. Sayanim (assistants) - must be 100 percent Jewish. They live abroad, and though they are not Israeli citizens, many are reached through their relatives in Israel. An Israeli with a relative in England, for example, might be asked to write a letter telling the person bearing the letter that he represents an organization whose main goal is to help save Jewish people in the Diaspora. Could the British relative help in any way? … There are thousands of sayanim around the world. In London alone, there are about 2,000 who are active, and another 5,000 on the list. They fulfill many different roles. A car sayan, for example, running a rental agency, could help the Mossad rent a car without having to complete the usual documentation. An apartment sayan would find accommodation without raising suspicions, a bank sayan could get you money if you needed it in the middle of the night, a doctor sayan would treat a bullet wound without reporting it to the police, and so on. The idea is to have a pool of people available when needed who can provide services but will keep quiet about them out of loyalty to the cause. They are paid only costs.

To prove that Ostrovsky wasn’t making things up, Atzmon writes that “the Israeli government used every possible means to stop the publication of his books.” Further, Atzmon shares the following conversation between two Israeli journalists to cement Ostrovsky’s account of Mossad’s clandestine network as truthful:

In a radio interview Joseph Lapid, at the time a senior Israeli columnist, opened his heart and told the world what he thought of Ostrovsky: ‘Ostrovsky is the most treacherous Jew in modern Jewish history. And he has no right to live, except if he’s prepared to return to Israel and stand trial.’

Valerie Pringle, the journalist on the other side of the line, asked Lapid: ‘Do you feel it’s a responsible statement to say what you’ve said?

Lapid: ‘Oh yes, I fully believe in that. And unfortunately the Mossad cannot do it because we cannot endanger our relations with Canada. But I hope there will be a decent Jew in Canada who does it for us.

Pringle: ‘You hope this. You could live with his blood on your hands?’

Lapid: ‘Oh no. It’s to...only it will not be his blood on my hands. It will be justice to a man who does the most horrible thing that any Jew can think of, and that is that he’s selling out the Jewish state and the Jewish people for money to our enemies. There is absolutely nothing worse that a human being, if he can be called a human being, can do’.

Lapid, later a member of Sharon’s cabinet, makes it very clear: to be a Jew is a deep commitment that goes far beyond any legal or moral order.

Instead of ostracisation as would happen in any civilised society after such egregious call for murder, Lapid would go on to serve as Israeli Minister of Law in Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s cabinet.

Victor Ostrovsky exposed Mossad’s network of sayanim in his book By Way of Deception.

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Israel runs one of the most prolific assassination factories in the world.

According to the book Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations, written by Ronen Bergman (one of the two award-winning Mossad stenographers from the NYT article referenced earlier in this piece), the self-proclaimed Jewish state has carried out more than 2,700 extrajudicial killings all over the world through the course of its criminal history. One commentator has written that Israel’s kill tally “underscores its reputation as, arguably, the most voracious assassination machine in history.”

It has barely faced any consequence for its globe-spanning murderous actions, if at all. It is no wonder, then, that an Israeli journalist can openly talk about assassinating an Israel critic in a foreign country. All that such a ghastly endeavour needed was a willing assassin.

But a willing murderer may no longer be an impediment — not when devices can explode in the face of a chosen target.

In the terrorism-glorifying 60 Minutes segment with two of the Mossad operatives behind the pager terror attacks in Lebanon, one of them boasts:

“We have an incredible array of possibilities of creating foreign companies that have no way of being traced back to Israel. Shell companies over shell companies who affect the supply chains in our favour.

“We create a pretend world. We are a global production company. We write the screenplay. We are the directors. We are the producers. We are the main actors.

“The world is our stage.”

This same modus operandi was at play during the Israeli terror attacks in Lebanon. Mossad operatives set up a fake company in Budapest, Hungary, and signed a contract with Gold Apollo to manufacture its pagers. They made it appear as a legitimate business without Hezbollah or Gold Apollo getting wind of it. Mossad ultimately rigged the devices, which ended up in the hands of Hezbollah personnel, with deadly explosives.

Israeli terrorism is transnational — “the world is our stage.”

Towards the end of the 60 Minutes segment, the same Mossad operative closes with an ominous message, “We have already moved on to the next thing and they will have to keep on trying to guess what the next thing is.”

With Jewish exceptionalism applied to Israel — an exclusive privilege that precludes the Jewish state from any repercussions for its actions even when it commits a live-streamed genocide and operates an unhinged assassination factory — there is nothing to stop the Israelis from weaponising the devices we have become dependent on every waking minute of our lives, and potentially exploding them whenever they want.

Since nearly half of the world’s adults are antisemitic and Israel has weaponised all sorts of gadgets to harm people it doesn’t approve of, who knows who the next victim of Israeli terrorism will be.

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