“They told me… there’s someone who wants to speak with you. And a man appeared from around the corner. He was the head of Mossad at the time, Yossi Cohen. He told me: ‘Help us with the investigations in Palestine. You won’t want to end up in matters that compromise your safety or that of your family’.”

In an interview with Al Jazeera, the former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Fatou Bensouda, revealed that former Israeli intelligence chief Yossi Cohen threatened her to halt investigations into Palestine to avoid reprisals against her family. Bensouda explained that Israel tried to block the inquiry opened by the ICC prosecutor against Israel for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, a proceeding officially initiated in 2021, well before October 7, 2023. According to the prosecutor’s account, Mossad chief Cohen met her twice, in Munich and in New York, explicitly asking her to stop the investigation, in what she described as a direct attempt to interfere with her work. The pressure escalated to include indirect threats to family members: the prosecutor’s husband was followed and personal information was collected to try to coerce her.

According to a 2024 investigation by the British newspaper The Guardian, Cohen — then head of Mossad and a close ally of Benjamin Netanyahu — personally led a covert operation against the International Criminal Court in an attempt to sabotage investigations into crimes committed in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The inquiry opened in 2021 later culminated in arrest warrant requests issued in November 2024 by Bensouda’s successor, Karim Khan, against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity committed against Palestinians.

https://x.com/Giorgioaki/status/2059233678400573800