A leak of several million emails from the Israeli Ministry of Justice
revealed a long-running lawfare operation aimed at shielding Israeli policies toward Palestinians from legal scrutiny in international and European courts, while also seeking to criminalize protest and advocacy against Israeli human rights violations. Spanning nearly 15 years and involving more than a dozen European countries, the emails are written mainly in Hebrew and show how several European countries collaborated with Israel to ensure impunity for its illegal occupation, paving the way to future war crimes. Media in Israel-Palestine are barred from reporting on the leak due to a gag order, making international collaboration essential. The leaked collection of MoJ documents have been indexed and made searchable for the public in the
Library of Leaks by the nonprofit whistleblower site Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoS).
This session presents how an independent journalist, working with European Investigative Collaborations (EIC) and multiple European newsrooms, analysed and reported on the leak using straightforward, accessible methods. The investigation relied primarily on close reading, systematic memo-writing, manual timeline construction, and country-by-country mapping of key actors and legal strategies, complemented by cross-referencing the emails with publicly available records.
The talk will share practical lessons on making sense of large email leaks in multilingual contexts, combining leaked material with open-source and public-domain data, coordinating cross-border reporting under legal constraints, and maintaining accuracy through repeated verification and collaborative review.
