UN-mandated Yemen investigation team chairman's mobile phone targeted by NSO spyware

A new forensic analysis has revealed an operation using the Israeli spyware maker NSO's spying of the mobile phone of a UN-backed investigator who was examining possible war crimes in Yemen, the Guardian has reported.

The Group of Eminent Experts in Yemen (GEE) was a panel mandated by the UN to investigate possible war crimes, but now has become defunct. But the panel's Tunisian chairman, Kamel Jendoubi's phone was targeted in August 2019, according to an analysis of his mobile phone by experts at Amnesty International and the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, the report said.

The targeting is claimed to have occurred just weeks before Jendoubi and his panel of experts released a damning report which concluded that the Saudi-led coalition in the Yemen war had committed "serious violations of international humanitarian law" that could lead to "criminal responsibility for war crimes".

Jendoubi's mobile number also appears on a leaked database at the heart of the Pegasus Project, an investigation into NSO by the Guardian and other media outlets, which was coordinated by Forbidden Stories, the French non-profit media group.

The leaked list contained numbers of individuals who were believed to have been selected as potential surveillance targets by NSO's government clients, the report added.