How Israel deployed its international lawfare department.

EIC reveals a number of stories showing how the Israel’s Ministry of Justice, under the office of the Prime Minister Netanyahu, has weaponised legal strategies to secure impunity for violations of international law. Based on a leak of more than two million documents from the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) in Israel, mostly covering the period from 2009 to spring 2023, the documents shed a new light on the legal strategies developed and implemented by Israel’s top lawyers. The leaked collection of documents of the MoJ have been indexed and made searchable for the public in the Library of Leaks by the nonprofit whistleblower site Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoS). You can support their work here.

The leak, for which an unknown group calling itself “Anonymous for Justice” claimed responsibility, was first reported in April 2024, but only outside Israel: a sweeping gag order prevents Israeli media from reporting even on the existence of the gag order, let alone on the content of the leak. Amnesty International’s Security Lab concluded last year that “the files are consistent with a hack-and-leak attack targeting a series of email accounts” and “did not show obvious signs of having been tampered with”.

A large portion of the documents originates from the “Department of Special International Affairs,” which was established in 2010 following a government decision and headed by Roy Schöndorf, a former military jurist in the international law unit who had previously developed legal justifications for extrajudicial killings. Emails show that on his side in the leadership was Marlene Mazel, who previously represented New York City in general litigation matters before moving to Israel and joining the ministry.

The department’s official mandate was to “handle all matters related to international legal proceedings (…) arising from the State’s actions in its fight against terrorism.” At the same time, it also worked to develop the international use of lawfare in Israel’s interests, while combating what it described as the “cynical exploitation of legitimate legal tools” against the State of Israel. It has done all of this in collaboration with more than a dozen law offices in Spain, Belgium, Germany, France, Switzerland, UK, USA, Italy, Sweden, Greece and South Africa among others, secretly aiding the state or companies working with it, spending tens of millions of Euros.

Internal classified documents written in late 2020, summarising ten years of the department’s work, claim that it “has irrevocably changed the way Israel deals with the challenges posed by ‘legal warfare’ and can boast a number of exceptional professional achievements,” such as “closing dozens of criminal and civil cases around the world against the state and its senior officials,” as well as “delaying, for a decade, the opening of an investigation by the ICC against the State of Israel”. That work was done in close collaboration with other ministries as well as with the IDF, the civil administration and the secret services.

We gather here the stories published by the EIC network and their partners. [Published 13.12.2025]