MK Moshe Saada (Likud) told Israel National News about the urgent need for a commission of inquiry that will reveal the meaning and extent of the illegal surveillance by the police of many citizens in Israel using the Pegasus espionage software developed by the Israeli company NSO Group.
“Obviously there will be a commission of inquiry, because the gap between what the police told the public and the reality is unprecedented,” Saada says and mentions that “a former commissioner and a deputy commissioner who was in charge of this said there were zero devices compromised by Pegasus. In the end it turned out that there were between one thousand and eighteen hundred devices compromised, and it should be understood that any such incident is a criminal offense because it was done without authority.”

“In this context, it is appropriate and correct to point out that listening to each of those thousand or eighteen hundred citizens, in a manner contrary to the law, means exposure to the conversations and correspondence of each of them with a circle of tens or hundreds of other citizens.”
“This is a serious violation of privacy, because when they extract the information from the phone, your whole world is taken with it. After all, it is not just about conversations, but WhatsApp, photos, emails, locations, apps, and more. Any extraction of material is an offense of violation of privacy punishable by up to five years in prison,”says Saada and adds: “In a decent country, when this became known through the Calcalist magazine, the police investigation department would have opened an investigation, but what happened here as part of the criminal act is that Mandelblit stopped the police investigation in order to appoint a body to investigate itself. He appointed his deputy to investigate the incident, which is really a disruption of procedures. All of this should be investigated objectively by a district judge.”
Saada emphasizes that there is no objection to this investigation demand. “Even from the opposition, I have not heard anyone objecting. There is no one trying to defend the conduct of the police and the prosecutor’s office.”
In such a reality, in the absence of opposition, and when it comes to such serious acts, Saada is convinced that a commission to investigate the events will be established and soon. “I believe that in the near future it should happen. It serves all the citizens of Israel. The public wants to know what happened here, so the causr crosses parties and factions, and with God’s help it will actually happen me.”