AG chides government for delaying law letting police use advanced tech to spy on suspects

Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara accuses the government of dragging its feet on passing a bill that would allow police to spy on certain suspects using “advanced technological means” including hacking and wiretapping.

Speaking to a gathering of officers in the police’s investigations and intelligence division, the attorney general says that a government-sponsored bill allowing for covert surveillance of suspects has been “sitting on the Israeli government’s table for a long time,” according to Hebrew media outlets.

“I call on the justice minister and national security minister to advance this already-prepared legislation in order to permit the Israel Police to operate with advanced technological means in the near future,” she says.

Her comments come in the wake of a particularly violent night in Arab society, in which four men were killed within hours, including one by police gunfire. The other three were gunned down in two separate shootings, one in Haifa, the other in the Negev Bedouin village of Lakiya.

Baharav-Miara and other public officials have insisted that police are hobbled in their fight against violent crime without the legal framework to surveil suspects through hacking and wiretapping.

National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who oversees the police, turns the accusation back on Baharav-Miara, insisting she is the main obstacle to the bill’s passage.

Deriding the attorney general as a criminal, the far-right politician accuses her of “preventing police from using technological means in the struggle against Arab criminal organizations.”

“Until we accede to her blackmail to use these same tools against elected officials. This is what interests her — fabricating cases [against] the right. We will not accept being blackmailed and the blood of the murdered Arabs is on her criminal hands!” he writes on X.