The courts will not investigate the spying on Pedro Sánchez with Pegasus due to Israel's "obstruction".

MadridThe Spanish National Court has been forced to shelve once again the investigation into the Pegasus spyware used on Spanish President Pedro Sánchez and three ministers due to Israel's lack of cooperation, as the spyware is produced in Israel by the NSO Group. On four occasions—between 2022 and 2025—Judge José Luis Calama requested information from Israel about this company, but the country repeatedly refused to respond, forcing him to "inevitably" postpone the case. In other words, the courts will not be able to determine for now who was behind the spying on the Spanish president. According to the judge, the investigation will remain shelved until information obtained through the "potential and unlikely" execution of the letter rogatory that Israel has "obstructed" allows the investigation to continue. Judge Calama even requested Israel He was able to travel there to question the NSO CEO, but never received a response. "To this day, there has been no acknowledgment or reply to the letters rogatory," he complains. The last reminder was in February 2025, nine months after a diplomatic crisis would erupt between Spain and Israel, and that Pedro Sánchez recognize the state of Palestine.

The judge laments that Israel's "blatant non-compliance" with its international obligations "prevents progress" in the investigation of the events and denounces the fact that the Jewish state has evaded these obligations "without any legal basis" and without offering "alternative mechanisms." He does, however, warn that the case can be reopened when "the current obstacles disappear." "Israel does not provide Spain with a level of cooperation equivalent to that received in substantially similar cases," he adds. And he harshly criticizes the obstacles he has encountered: "Such behavior disrupts the balance inherent in international cooperation and violates the principle of good faith that should govern relations between states."

All of this dates back to May 2022. Moncloa denounced that the phones of the Spanish president and the Minister of Defense, Margarita Robles, were spied on in 2021. Subsequently, it was discovered that the devices of the Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, and the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food and former ambassador to Morocco, Luis Planas, had also been infected. The requests for information in Israel were based on the fact that it was "essential" to determine the "identity" of the people who had participated in the commission of the acts, which would point to crimes related to the discovery and disclosure of secrets.

Israel's lack of cooperation had already forced the investigating judge to provisionally shelve the case in July 2023. But It reopened in April 2024 After receiving information from France, which in 2021 had launched an investigation when it was revealed that President Emmanuel Macron, along with journalists, lawyers, and other political leaders, had also been spied on, the Spanish National Intelligence Center (CNI) concluded that it is impossible to establish any connection or link between the infiltrations in France and those in Spain. However, the information provided by France has not yielded any new information regarding the data that may have been extracted from the infected phones in Spain, as the malicious code "leaves no activity logs beyond the amount of data extracted." Therefore, it is "technically impossible" to say anything about the "nature of the information" to which the attackers may have had access. Furthermore, the CNI has concluded that it is "impossible" to establish "any relationship or link" between the infiltrations in France and Spain.

Suspicions about Morocco

The timing of the infiltrations has led to speculation that the espionage originated in Morocco. Sánchez's phone was compromised in May and June of 2021, and precisely on May 17 of that year, more than 5,000 Moroccans swam to Ceuta, an event interpreted as a power struggle between Morocco and Spain through migratory pressure. Furthermore, around the same time, it was also learned that Brahim Ghali, the Secretary General of the Polisario Front and a Sahrawi political leader opposed to Morocco, was receiving medical treatment in a hospital in Logroño. In any case, despite these suspicions, now lacking concrete evidence, Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares took advantage of the reopening of the Ceuta and Melilla borders to avoid endorsing these "conjectures or hypotheses."

Infiltrations have also been linked to the change of position of the Moncloa Palace in Western SaharaHowever, it was in 2022—a year later—that Sánchez decided to ally himself with Morocco after decades of neutrality. Minister Margarita Robles also severed ties both issues.