Phones of former ministry heads were hacked by foreign state, not police – report
ZecOps finds Shai Babad, Keren Terner Eyal and Emi Palmor — all named in bombshell Calcalist wiretapping report — were never targeted by police or with NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware

An Israeli cybersecurity company has examined the phones of three former ministry directors general suspected of being the targets of a spyware attack and found they were hacked by a foreign state, according to a Sunday report.
ZecOps, which specializes in phone hacking, examined the devices of Shai Babad, the former director-general of the Finance Ministry; Keren Terner Eyal, also a former director-general of that ministry as well as the Transportation Ministry; and Emi Palmor, a former director-general of the Justice Ministry, Channel 13 news reported Sunday.
The examination was launched after the three ministerial directors were named in a series of bombshell reports by the Calcalist newspaper in January as alleged targets of Israel Police spyware attacks.
Calcalist reported, without providing evidence or sources, that dozens of high-profile figures — including former ministry directors, prominent business figures, and family members and associates of former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu — were spied on by police using the NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware without court orders.
According to the Channel 13 report, ZecOps confirmed that Babad, Terner Eyal and Palmor were never targeted by the police and were not hacked with NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware. The private firm could not specify which foreign entity targeted them.
The Calcalist reports sparked an uproar in Israel that led to a Justice Ministry probe and further calls for a state commission of inquiry. Last week, Justice Minister Gideon Sa’ar said the allegations published in Calcalist were “incorrect” and that while police had used Pegasus, there was no basis to allege widespread, unsupervised hacking. He nixed plans for a government inquiry into the affair.