ISTANBUL

An online news outlet has alleged that numerous US media figures are former Israeli spies, claiming they are linked to "the Israeli military’s largest and most controversial division."

Axios White House reporter Barak Ravid, and former CNN producers Shachar Peled and Tal Heinrich, are all alumni of Israel’s Unit 8200 -- a covert operations, spying and cyberwarfare unit, the leftist MintPress News outlet reported Wednesday.

The unit "serves as the centerpiece of Israel’s futuristic repressive state apparatus," and engages in the mass collection of Palestinians' personal information that Israel uses as a potent weapon in furtherance of its occupation, it said.

"Using gigantic amounts of data compiled on Palestinians by tracking their every move through face recognition cameras monitoring their calls, messages, emails and personal data, Unit 8200 has created a dystopian dragnet that it uses to surveil, harass and suppress Palestinians," it said.

It pointed in particular to Unit 8200's involvement in Israel's efforts to compile dossiers on all Palestinians in the occupied territories, focused on finding information that can be used for extortion and blackmail. That includes any relevant information from online search histories, sex lives and medical histories.

"If, for example, an individual is cheating on their spouse, desperately needs a medical operation, or is secretly homosexual, this can be used as leverage to turn civilians into informants and spies for Israel," said the report.

Unit 8200 has also been widely identified as the group behind last month’s pager attack in Lebanon, which maimed thousands of people across the country, including civilians, an operation acknowledged by former CIA Director Leon Panetta as terrorism.

"I don’t think there’s any question that it’s a form of terrorism," he said during an interview with CBS in September.

In the wake of a damning letter in which 43 Unit 8200 reservists denounced the group for committing "abuses" against Palestinians, including indiscriminate surveillance that was "an integral part of Israel's military occupation," Ravid, the Axios White House reporter, lashed out at the group.

He insisted in 2014 when the statement was issued that the "occupation" is "a part" of Israel.

“If the problem is really the occupation,” he said, according to Jewish news outlet, Forward, “then your taxes are also a problem — they fund the soldier at the checkpoint, the education system … and 8200 is a great spin.”

In addition to her three-year stint as an officer in Unit 8200, Peled, the CNN producer, also worked as an analyst with Israel's spy agency, Shin Bet, before joining the news network. Peled went on to take a job at Google as a senior media specialist after CNN.

But prior to Peled's stint at CNN, the network employed fellow Unit 8200 alum Tal Heinrich as a field and news desk producer for its Jerusalem Bureau from 2014 to 2017. Heinrich now sits as a spokesperson for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

MintPress writer Alan Macleod said he was not accusing the journalists of being current spies, but did question their suitability for journalism given their past work in espionage.

“While I'm not saying these individuals are spies, are people with these pasts truly appropriate candidates to write Americans' news about Israel/Palestine? What if it were ex-Hamas/Hezbollah intelligence operatives now running things at CNN or elsewhere?” he asked on X.

Former Unit 8200 agents also created the notorious Pegasus software used to surveil journalists, activists and heads of state around the world, according to MintPress.

The unit is also reportedly behind Lavender, the AI software that automatically generates kill lists of tens of thousands of Gazans and aids in the deadly bombing campaign in the enclave.

Beyond Unit 8200, the report noted that former Israeli military spokesperson Tamar Michaelis is now a Middle East reporter for CNN, and highlighted the New York Times' hiring of former Israeli Air Force Intelligence officer Anat Schwartz.

Schwartz penned the now discredited "Screams without words" investigative piece that alleged that sexual violence was used systemically as a weapon of war during Hamas' Oct. 7, 2023, cross-border attack.

The piece sparked internal uproar in the Times' newsroom and prompted a joint call from dozens of journalism professors to carry out an independent review of the story.

The Intercept, a left-wing online news site, published a story Feb. 28 in which it pointed out that the family of one of the slain victims central to the Times' report denied she had been raped. One family member said they had been pressured "under false pretenses" to speak to the media in the first place.

The reporters that worked on the story "mentioned they want to write a report in memory of Gal, and that’s it. If we knew that the title would be about rape and butchery, we’d never accept that," Gal Abdush's sister posted on Instagram.

Separately, an update to the story published in March, three months after the story hit the media -- a highly unusual timespan for an editorial practice normally conducted within days if not hours -- noted that "newly released video" the newspaper reviewed undercut some details used in the story.

A New York Times memo that was leaked in November raised further questions about the newspaper's coverage of Israel and Palestine, revealing that reporters are barred from using terms such as “genocide,” “slaughter” and “ethnic cleansing” when referring to Israel.

Other prohibitions are in place on words such as “refugee camp,” “occupied territory” and “Palestine."

Similar pressures were also discovered at CNN after staffers publicly acknowledged a memo from the networks' Editor-in-Chief Mark Thompson, instructing reporters that they "must continue always to remind our audiences of the immediate cause of this current conflict, namely the Hamas attack and mass murder and kidnap of civilians."

Several journalists at the news outlets who have voiced criticism of Israeli practices, or who have supported Palestinian self-determination, have been fired or forced out. That includes award-winning Black female journalist Jazmine Hughes, who wrote for the Times for eight years before she was dismissed in 2023 after signing a letter denouncing Israel's "eliminationist assault" on Gaza.

"Large organizations like Axios, CNN and the New York Times obviously know who they are hiring. These are some of the most sought-after jobs in journalism, and hundreds of applicants are likely applying for each position. The fact that these organizations choose to select Israeli spies above everybody else raises serious questions about their journalistic credibility and their purpose," said the MintPress News story.

"Hiring agents from Unit 8200 to produce American news should be as unthinkable as employing Hamas or Hezbollah fighters as reporters. Yet former Israeli spooks are entrusted with informing the American public about their country’s ongoing offensives against Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, Iran and Syria. What does this say about the credibility and biases of our media?" it added.