Just over a week after the International Criminal Court announced it had officially applied for an arrest warrant for two top Israeli officials over the Israel Defense Forces’ assault on Gaza, an investigative report revealed Tuesday that the Israeli intelligence chief spent close to a decade attempting to intimidate the ICC’s prosecutor into halting a war crimes probe.
Former ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda opened a preliminary investigation into Israel’s actions in Palestine in 2015, a year after Israel launched an offensive in Gaza that killed 2,251 Palestinians in less than two months. Bensouda aimed to make an initial assessment of allegations of possible war crimes in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem.
According to Israeli publications +972 Magazine and Local Calland U.K. newspaper The Guardian, Bensouda and her prosecution team soon began to receive warnings that Mossad, the Israeli national intelligence agency, “was taking a close interest in their work.”
After briefly meeting Bensouda at the Munich Security Conference in 2017, Mossad Director Yossi Cohen “ambushed” the prosecutor at a hotel in New York in 2018, when Bensouda was meeting Democratic Republic of Congo President Joseph Kabila.
“The pair had met several times before in relation to the ICC’s ongoing investigation into alleged crimes committed in his country,” reported The Guardian. “The meeting, however, appears to have been a setup. At a certain point, after Bensouda’s staff were asked to leave the room, Cohen entered, according to three sources familiar with the meeting. The surprise appearance, they said, caused alarm to Bensouda and a group of ICC officials traveling with her. Why Kabila helped Cohen is unclear, but ties between the two men were revealed in 2022 by the Israeli publication TheMarker.”
The investigation found that Cohen—who retired in 2021—repeatedly called Bensouda and sought meetings with her after the “ambush,” eventually prompting Bensouda to alert senior ICC officials about the Mossad chief’s conduct after his tactics shifted to “threats and manipulation.” One ICC official compared Cohen’s behavior to “stalking.
Global News 
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