Israel is spying — Again.
The Pentagon’s own intelligence agency now considers Israel — the country Washington calls its “closest ally”, arms with American weapons, and fights alongside in Iran — a “critical” counterintelligence threat. That’s the highest designation the Defense Intelligence Agency uses. It’s a label normally reserved for adversaries, not partners.
NBC News broke the story Friday night, citing two current U.S. officials and one former official. According to their reporting, the DIA issued the new assessment in recent weeks and circulated an internal message raising Israel’s threat level to “critical.”
The full assessment runs seven pages, includes a chart, and concludes that Israel’s capacity for both human espionage and technical collection against the United States has reached a critical level.
It also catalogs a series of specific incidents that drove U.S. concerns.
What Triggered it
The timing is not a mystery. The Trump administration and the Netanyahu government are openly at odds over how to end the war with Iran — the war they launched together on February 28.
Since the ceasefire took hold in early April, Trump has been chasing a diplomatic deal with Tehran.
Netanyahu has publicly dismissed the talks, pushed for renewed bombing, and resisted Trump’s pressure to scale back attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon.
The two leaders had a phone call so heated last week that Trump admitted to reporters he called Netanyahu “f***ing crazy.”
That’s the context in which, U.S. officials say, Israeli intelligence has been working overtime to find out what the Trump administration is actually thinking — surveilling top U.S. officials to get inside the administration’s deliberations on Iran and the wider Middle East.
Follow-up reporting filled in the alarming specifics. The New York Times reported that the assessment came after American defense personnel stationed in Israel discovered surveillance software covertly installed on their phones — and that the targets of Israeli collection efforts included Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and the Pentagon’s top policy official, Elbridge Colby.
One senior official described the aggressiveness of Israeli intelligence collection during the second Trump administration as “unhinged.”
Everyone Spies. This is Different.
Yes, allies spy on each other. The U.S. famously tapped German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone, as the Snowden leaks revealed in 2013.
And Israel’s reputation for aggressive espionage against Washington is decades old — Navy intelligence analyst Jonathan Pollard spent 30 years in U.S. prison for selling suitcases of classified documents to Israel in the 1980s.
American officials already travel to Israel with burner phones and assume their hotel rooms are bugged.
But that’s exactly what makes this designation extraordinary. The officials who spoke to NBC said Israel’s recent activity goes “well beyond” normal allied espionage.
According to the Times’ reporting, Israel’s counterintelligence threat level now sits higher than any other U.S. ally — and higher than some adversaries.
The DIA doesn’t slap a “critical” label on a partner government because of business-as-usual snooping. It does it because something changed.
Israel’s embassy called the reporting “completely false,” insisting Israel “does not gather intelligence on American entities.”
A White House official dismissed the entire story as false and badly sourced.
The Pentagon declined to comment, which is its own kind of answer.
The Contradiction Congress Doesn’t Want to Talk About
At the very moment the Pentagon’s intelligence arm is flagging Israel as a critical espionage threat, Congress is advancing legislation to fuse the two militaries more tightly together.
NDAA Section 224, which Resist Hate covered previously, would deepen U.S.-Israel military integration — shared systems, shared planning, shared infrastructure.
You cannot simultaneously hand a government the keys to your defense apparatus and classify it as a top-tier spy threat without someone, somewhere, asking questions.
And the stakes aren’t abstract. The information Israel is allegedly hunting for — whether Trump resumes bombing Iran or ends the war — is the difference between diplomacy and more body bags.
Resist Hate’s Iran war coverage has documented the civilian toll of this conflict from its first days.
A foreign government surveilling American officials to tilt that decision toward more war isn’t a diplomatic embarrassment.
It’s a direct attempt to shape whether the killing continues.
For now, the practical fallout is muted: officials say intelligence sharing continues daily, and U.S. personnel will simply take “extra caution” around their Israeli counterparts.
Extra caution. With our closest ally.
That sentence alone tells you everything about where this relationship actually stands — and how little of it the public is supposed to see.
