On a September morning in 2026, one of Israel’s most respected investigative journalists made a quiet but devastating announcement. Gur Megiddo, a man who had spent more than a decade digging into the darkest corners of power, was leaving his post at TheMarker, not because he had run out of stories, but because he had lost faith in what stories could do. “I entered this profession at a time when it was already in decline,” he wrote, “and yet, I had many good years when facts were enough to prompt an investigation, bring someone to trial, prevent an appointment or thwart a bad decision.” Those days, he explained, were over. Facts no longer moved the machinery of justice. They no longer shook institutions or forced the powerful to answer for their actions. Social media had poisoned the information environment beyond anything he could have imagined, and Israeli society, like human society itself, had fallen ill. It was a heartbreaking confession from a man whose career had been built on the belief that exposing wrongdoing matters. What he did not yet know was that one of his most extraordinary investigations, a months-long project exposing a shadowy Israeli operative, would soon become the perfect proof of his despair. That project was part of Story Killers, an international reporting initiative coordinated by Forbidden Stories, an organization dedicated to the memory of Gauri Lankesh, the Indian journalist murdered in 2017 after decades of fearless reporting and an online campaign of incitement against her. Lankesh had understood, long before many of us did, that the battle against fake news and disinformation was inseparable from the struggle against authoritarianism and far-right extremism. Her murder was not an isolated act of violence; it was an attack on the very idea that journalism can protect democracy. And now, nearly a decade later, her legacy was being carried into Israel, where Megiddo had uncovered a man selling chaos to the highest bidder.
The man at the center of Megiddo’s investigation was Tal Hanan, an Israeli citizen operating from a modest office in Modi’in, a central Israeli city best known as the home of intelligence agencies and cybersecurity firms. Hanan was no ordinary hacker. He was a merchant of manipulation, a private contractor with a global reach, and he spoke to the journalists with alarming candor. Over the course of the investigation, he admitted to running disinformation campaigns using tens of thousands of fake accounts, ready to be deployed at a moment’s notice. He hacked into Telegram and Gmail accounts of people in Kenya and Mozambique, right in front of the reporters, as if performing a party trick. He described adding “a little salt and pepper” to his operations, by which he meant forged documents and fabricated emails, staged to look like leaks, then pushed out into the world to destabilize elections, topple governments, or simply destroy reputations. He boasted that he could open a website in the style of WikiLeaks and publish anything on it: pictures, receipts, emails, none of it needing to be true. His systems were not just methods; they were weapons, and he wielded them across continents. He took responsibility for a cyberattack during the Catalan independence referendum, for an attack on Indonesia’s General Elections Commission, and for disabling the phones of Nigeria’s opposition leaders. He presented confidential banking documents belonging to a Mongolian politician, claimed to have hacked the email account of the chief of staff to the former prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, and then leaked a document from that account in a calculated attempt to provoke a political crisis. None of this was speculation. Megiddo’s investigation included explicit admissions, documents, presentations, videos, and independent verification that the actions Hanan boasted about had actually happened. This was not some distant theoretical threat. This was a citizen of Israel, operating from Israeli soil, actively undermining democratic processes around the world, and doing so without shame.
As an Israeli lawyer and human rights activist, I read Megiddo’s investigation with a mixture of horror and professional duty. On February 15, 2023, I submitted a formal complaint to the State Attorney and the Police Commissioner, asking them to open a criminal investigation into Hanan and his Israeli associates. The evidence was overwhelming. There were explicit admissions, corroborated by documents and videos. There was clear criminal intent. Hanan had spoken openly about hacking, forgery, fraud, and interference in foreign elections, and he had demonstrated his methods in real time. In my complaint, I outlined a range of offenses under Israeli law, including fraud, extortion, deception, impersonation, forgery, and election interference. I also cited multiple violations of Israel’s Computers Law, including disrupting computer systems, introducing false information, and unlawfully accessing computer material. Given the scale and systematic nature of the operation, I asked that Hanan and his associates be investigated under Israel’s Anti-Organized Crime Law as well. This was not a marginal case. This was a case that struck at the very foundations of democratic governance, not only for the countries targeted, but for Israel’s own claim to uphold the rule of law. Any reasonable reading of the evidence suggested that the elements of these offenses had been met, and that the prosecution was under a legal and moral obligation to indict him. I submitted the full evidentiary file to the police’s Investigations and Intelligence Division. I waited. And waited. For three years and eight months, nothing happened. The silence was not merely bureaucratic. It was a statement. And when the answer finally came, it was almost insulting in its brevity. On October 25, 2026, the Cybercrime Division of the State Attorney’s Office informed me that the police investigation file had been examined and “the decision was made to close it.” No detailed reasoning. No explanation of why evidence of explicit admissions and demonstrated criminal activity was somehow insufficient. Just a terse notice that the case was over.
The decision to close the case was, to put it mildly, deeply perplexing. When there is evidence in the form of documents, videos, presentations, and explicit admissions, and when there is such an unequivocal public interest in pursuing the matter, the absence of an indictment raises serious questions. It raises concerns that the closure may have resulted from extraneous considerations, unrelated to the merits of the evidence. Megiddo himself revealed that Hanan had been active in the security business long before social media existed. In 1999, he founded a company registered at his home address in Modi’in. Its website claimed it was engaged in “fighting terrorism” and “training forces,” and it had at one point held a defense-export license from Israel’s defense ministry. This was not a fringe character. A former senior Israeli intelligence official, who had been exposed to Hanan’s activities, told Megiddo: “I have no idea how Hanan worked his way into this position…I know he has connections with very senior and serious people in the intelligence agencies in Israel and the United States.” Those connections, if true, would explain a great deal. They would explain why a case with overwhelming evidence was quietly buried. They would explain why the institutions of law enforcement, which are supposed to act without fear or favor, suddenly seemed so timid. And they would explain why, despite the global reach of his operations, no other country is known to have initiated or concluded proceedings against Hanan following the investigation. This is not the behavior of a country that respects the rule of law. This is the behavior of a country that, at best, tolerates the commercialization of chaos, and at worst, protects those who profit from it.
The closing of Hanan’s case is not an isolated incident. It is part of a broader and deeply troubling pattern. In recent years, Israel and Israeli citizens have been embroiled in a long series of scandals involving defense exports, cyber operations, disinformation campaigns, and intelligence services provided by Israelis abroad. Sometimes these operations have been exposed by journalists; sometimes they have been exposed by foreign governments. But in almost every case, the response from Israeli authorities has been the same: denial, delay, or quiet closure. This pattern suggests a deeper reality than a few bad actors. It suggests that Israel is, in essence, a rogue state, whose regulatory and law-enforcement authorities are either themselves involved in such affairs or prefer to turn a blind eye to them. It is a reality that fills me with a sadness I struggle to put into words. Megiddo was right when he wrote that facts no longer prompt investigations, that social media has poisoned the information environment beyond recognition, and that human society has fallen ill. His departure from TheMarker was a human moment, a breaking point, a confession that even the most dedicated among us can grow tired of fighting a battle that seems impossible to win. And yet, for all his despair, I cannot accept a world without journalists who carry on the legacy of Gauri Lankesh. I cannot accept a world where the work of exposing power is dismissed as futile. Lankesh was murdered because she refused to stop. She knew that the forces of authoritarianism, extremism, and disinformation would not defeat themselves, and she faced them with courage until her final breath.
Even when investigative journalists cannot change reality, because the forces they confront are too powerful, their work is not in vain. It remains essential. It is a record for future generations. It is a reminder that someone was willing to ask the difficult questions, to challenge the vested interests and power structures, to expose the manipulation, immorality, and corruption that run through our societies like poison. Megiddo’s investigation into Tal Hanan may not have led to an indictment. It may not have secured accountability. But it revealed a truth that powerful people wanted to keep hidden, and that truth will not simply disappear because a file was closed. It exists in the words of journalists, in the memories of readers, and in the long memory of history. There will come a day when the institutions of justice again do their work, when facts once again carry the weight they deserve, and when the flame of truth, fed by the sacrifices of people like Gauri Lankesh, will burn brightly once more. Until that day, we must keep the fire alive. We must support the journalists, the whistleblowers, the lawyers, and the ordinary citizens who refuse to look away. We must understand that the illness Megiddo described is not universal, and that resistance to it is not hopeless. It is slow, painful, and often thankless, but it is not hopeless. And as long as there are people willing to do that work, to tell the truth in the face of power, to preserve our humanity and our hope, then the story is not over. The case may have been closed, but the fight is not.