Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has suggested that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu bugged his loo during a visit to London in 2017. Johnson said his security team found the device after the Israeli prime minister used the privy, The Jerusalem Post reported citing Johnson’s recently released book.
Johnson said a listening device was discovered in the private bathroom at the Foreign Office after it was used by the Israeli leader during one of their meetings. At the time, Johnson was the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs.
“Thither Bibi repaired for a while, and it may or may not be a coincidence but I am told that later, when they were doing a regular sweep for bugs, they found a listening device in the thunderbox [a slang term for bathroom],” Johnson wrote in his new memoir.
Around the same time as the meeting with Johnson, Israel allegedly planted listening devices in the White House, according to the Telegraph. The Middle Eastern country has also been accused of spying on the International Criminal Court (ICC), The Guardian reported.
The report claimed that Israel has been running an almost decade-long secret “war” against the court which announced arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, in May for alleged war crimes in Gaza. Israel had deployed its intelligence agencies to reportedly surveil, hack, pressure, “smear”, and allegedly “threaten” senior ICC staff in an attempt to derail the court’s inquiries, the report wrote in late May.
According to one intelligence source, the report writes, Netanyahu took on a “close interest” in the intelligence operations against the ICC and was described as being “obsessed” with information on the case.