Ramallah

- During our phone call with the human rights activist, lawyer Salah Al-Hammouri, the voice was not clear, so he apologized, explaining that he is using a very old mobile phone, in order to preserve his privacy after discovering that he was being spied on by hacking his iPhone. ).

Al-Hammouri noticed - earlier - some calls on his mobile phone that come to him from contacts known to him, and when he answers the call, he does not find an answer or a voice, and when he asks those who called him about it, they deny that they made the call in the first place. This was repeated more than once, and when it was discovered that the phone of Ghassan Al-Halaiqa - his colleague at the Al-Haq Foundation - was hacked, Al-Hammouri went to examine the phone with the help of the Frontline Foundation, which supports human rights defenders around the world. Indeed, a spyware program was found on his Pegasus phone, which is produced by the Israeli company NSO, on October 21.

Representatives of the six human rights organizations pursued by Israel, and declared - earlier last month - as terrorist organizations, and a military decision was issued to that effect on Sunday, the seventh of this November. They announced - during a press conference - that the phones of 6 activists working in the field were exposed. Human rights infiltration, including Hammouri, Halayqa, and Abi al-Abawi - director of Bisan Center from the six organizations - and 3 others, two of whom are employees of the Palestinian Authority, who are following up the cases of prosecuting Israel for its crimes before the International Criminal Court.

Although Hammouri - as he told Al Jazeera Net - left work in the Addameer Foundation for Prisoner Care and Human Rights, one of the six institutions pursued by Israel and declared as terrorist organizations, the decision to announce these institutions coincided with the occupation's decision to withdraw his Jerusalem card on the 17th of the same month, made him feel It is in the target circle.

Al-Hammoury - who is Al-Maqdisi and a former prisoner in the prisons of the occupation for 9 separate years - believes that the accusing finger necessarily points to the occupation authorities;

It is she who has the interest and the possibility, as he says, "The occupation targets every detail of our lives, to lay down its plans to violate our rights based on the information it obtains by various means."

Human rights activist and lawyer Salah Hammouri discovered that he was being spied on by hacking his iPhone smartphone (Reuters)

Who has the interest and the possibility?

Al-Hammouri will personally follow up on this legal penetration in France, of which he is a national, in addition to the collective action, which is being studied by the parties affected by this penetration.

The collective action has not yet been determined - according to what the deputy director of the Al-Haq Foundation told Al-Jazeera Net - but the main demand they have now collectively is to demand the formation of a commission of inquiry from the United Nations during the coming period to conduct an international investigation into the matter.

According to what Alyan said to Al-Jazeera Net, the beginning of the disclosure began after examining the phone of their colleague Halaika, who, like Hammouri, noticed some strange calls he received from parties known to him, and because of the previous occupation threats to the institution and its employees, since the start of its follow-up to cases of international criminal files, as it arrived These threats to the point of murder, he had doubts about the possibility of hacking his phone.

After going to Frontline Defenders, which examined the device and discovered the presence of the spyware, which was confirmed by Amnesty International and the Canadian “Citizen Lab” to monitor the Internet, then with the start of examining the phones of the employees of the institution and institutions working in This area shows penetration of the six phones.

Elayyan confirms the results of the examination, which showed that the copy of the program used to spy on these mobile phones did not have a code for the country that used it. The authority owns to spy on parties working on files of interest to it.

Despite this disclosure, Alyan says that the occupation failed to obtain information that stops the work of these institutions and prevents them from pursuing its crimes, although the espionage operation began in the middle of 2020, according to the results of the examination, which made the occupation turn to the decision to declare these institutions terrorist. .

Al-Aboudi spoke during the press conference about his individual orientation - as he holds American citizenship - to individual legal follow-up, since the manufacturer of the spyware requires signing a pledge for any country that owns the program after using it to spy on American and Israeli citizens.

How does Pegasus work?

Olayan does not rule out that the devices of other workers have been compromised, since this detection affected iPhone-type devices, and there is no mechanism to check Android devices.

And about the Pegasus program, which was developed by the Israeli company based in Tel Aviv, and sold at a cost of more than one million dollars, a doctor of computer engineering at Birzeit University, Iyad Tomar - told Al Jazeera Net - that this program is one of the most complex spying programs, so whoever developed it is one of the best professional programmers on the Internet. world level, and the cost of its development is very high.

At the beginning of the launch of the program, he was exploiting the technological gaps in the devices operating smart phones running the “iOS” system (iOS) as soon as a person receives a message - regardless of its type - the program begins to activate itself, but after the first spying scandal that was revealed in 2014, phone companies began filling these gaps.

But now - as Tomar says - the program needs to be activated by the owner of the device by clicking on the message or the link that arrives to activate it on the device until it starts working.

The program copies everything contained in the mobile phone, and the movements that take place through it. It copies the voice, images and information, records the calls, and then transmits them to the concerned authorities.

Tomar says that any party that has a political and financial interest, and has money, can own this program, such as governments that spy on activists and human rights defenders, or countries that spy on other countries, or mafia groups and drug dealers.