Hacked emails show Yahav Lichner, a UN official, repeatedly supplied Israeli diplomats with confidential UN reports and private briefings. H
Hacked emails show Yahav Lichner, a UN official, repeatedly supplied Israeli diplomats with confidential UN reports and private briefings. He now directs UNICEF’s Washington office.
[...]
Over a two-year period between 2014 and 2015, emails show, Lichner repeatedly supplied Israeli officials with internal UN documents, private meeting accounts, pre-release material, and other political intelligence—including documentation marked as “strictly confidential”—which was later used by Israeli officials to help shape their own efforts to both proactively lobby the U.S. government and undercut UN initiatives they viewed as unfavorable to Israel. The communications showing Lichner leaking confidential information to officials in the Israeli government come from a hacked database of emails from Prosor, Israel’s permanent representative to the UN from 2011 to 2015. The emails were posted online by Distributed Denial of Secrets, a whistleblower and file-sharing website, after being obtained by Handala, a hacking group believed to be tied to Iranian intelligence.
[...]
UN officials are subject to rules defining staff as international civil servants whose responsibilities are “not national but exclusively international.” The organization’s internal guidelines also strictly prohibit officials from communicating information to any “government, entity, person or any other source any information known to them by reason of their official position.” A former senior UN official confirmed that the behavior documented in the emails is expressly prohibited by UN guidelines.
4 August 2026
