The state agreed last Tuesday, through officials from the State Attorney’s Office, to a proposed court settlement to pay 100,000 shekels to Moran Segev, partner of suspended Hadera Mayor Zvi Gendelman, after police unlawfully accessed her mobile phone using the NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware. The move, based on a compromise suggested by Judge Gad Mina of the Tel Aviv Magistrate’s Court, could pave the way for dozens of similar lawsuits by citizens whose phones were also breached.
The proposed settlement stems from a July 20 hearing in Tel Aviv Magistrate’s Court, part of the first civil claim filed in November 2022 over improper Pegasus surveillance. Mina held a one-sided, two-hour in-camera session, according to the official transcript, and later told the parties he intended to propose a compromise.
In outlining his reasoning, Mina wrote that he considered the state’s own intelligence summary — a “paraphrase” document — which indicated that beyond intercepting communications, police tools also extracted contacts and additional data stored on Segev’s phone. He noted that the Privacy Protection Law caps compensation for a single privacy violation at 70,000 shekels and that he saw no basis to treat the data extraction as multiple violations warranting separate damages.
Mina said the paraphrase shows the state acknowledged infringing on a citizen’s privacy and therefore must compensate under law. He set 70,000 shekels as the ceiling for the violation and added 30,000 shekels for legal fees and expenses as part of the settlement structure.
Potential for dozens more claims
The judge’s explanation signals that more claims are likely. The state has already sent about 40 paraphrase documents with similar admissions to additional citizens who were suspects or connected to them. Each document acknowledges that police accessed a device and extracted data without proper authority.
According to the State Attorney’s Office, police attempted to deploy Pegasus in 1,086 cases. It remains unclear how many phones were successfully infected or how much information was extracted. The state recently told the High Court that its review of those cases is ongoing.
If the paraphrase served as the key evidence guiding the proposed settlement in Segev’s case, attorneys say others are likely to file similar claims, attaching their own paraphrases and citing Mina’s reasoning on compensation. Based on the roughly 40 comparable cases already acknowledged, potential liability could reach about 4 million shekels. If even half of the more than 1,000 reviewed cases ultimately show unlawful data extraction, payouts could exceed 50 million shekels.
Public pays, officials do not
Legal experts note that under law, the state must compensate citizens when their privacy is violated. But they also highlight a recurring frustration: the financial burden falls on the public, not on the officials who approved, supervised or failed to oversee the surveillance operations. Those individuals have so far avoided personal accountability, while taxpayers absorb the cost.