"For Your Eyes Only": Israel’s Mole Inside the United Nations

"For Your Eyes Only": Israel’s Mole Inside the United Nations Drop Site is a reader-funded, independent news outlet. Without your support, we can’t operate. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber or making a 501(c)(3) tax-deductible donation today. • •An empty seat for Israel during a ministerial high level meeting during a United Nations conference on a two state solution for Israel and the Palestinians, at UN headquarters on July 28, 2025, in New York City. Photo by TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP via Getty Images. On February 20, 2015, an official of the United Nations Population Fund sent two Israeli diplomats an email containing a confidential report about a trip two weeks earlier to Washington, D.C. by Zeid Ra’ad Al-Hussein, then the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. “For your eyes only. Do not forward,” Yahav Lichner wrote to then-Israeli Ambassador to the UN Ron Prosor and diplomat Ronny Leshno-Yaar in a message sent from Lichner’s personal email account, describing the report as a “classified internal summary of Zeid’s meetings in Washington.” The meetings came at a time when Israel was facing an independent commission inquiry by the UN Human Rights Council over its conduct during the 2014 military offensive against the Gaza Strip. The document recorded private meetings that Al-Hussein held with White House officials, senators, congressional appropriations staff, AIPAC, J Street, and human rights organizations. It also revealed a concern inside Al-Hussein’s office: that congressional anger over the UN inquiry could threaten American funding for the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). Lichner added that Al-Hussein had met with members of Congress including “our friend,” the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, adding that Al-Hussein was “trying to do damage control and distance himself from the report.” Leshno-Yaar responded that he intended to act on the intelligence that Lichner had provided. “Thank you Yahav. I have no choice and of course without addressing this information I must act with members of Congress to make them understand,” before listing the arguments he planned to make about Al-Hussein and the Gaza commission’s secretariat. “Absolutely,” Lichner replied. “You are right.” The exchange was far from a one-off: 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. Prosor is currently Israel’s ambassador to Germany, while Lichner has served since January 2025 as director of the Washington, D.C., office of UNICEF, the United Nations children’s agency. Prior to joining the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), Lichner worked at Israel’s mission to the UN from 2011 to early 2014. The emails showing leaks of classified UN information and other communications with Israeli officials came from a period when Lichner served at the UNFPA and does not indicate whether or not it has continued in his role at UNICEF. Lichner previously served as Prosor’s