"For Your Eyes Only": Israel’s Mole Inside the United NationsHacked emails show Yahav Lichner, a UN official, repeatedly supplied Israeli diplomats with confidential UN reports and private briefings. He now directs UNICEF’s Washington office.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 political advisor at Israel’s embassy in London and later as a senior advisor at Israel’s UN mission.
The emails suggest that Prosor personally promoted Lichner’s UNFPA candidacy, drawing on the assistance of then U.S. Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power to privately lobby for his appointment and later providing a glowing reference letter to the agency.
That placement appeared to pay dividends as Lichner continually fed inside information from the UN to Prosor and other Israeli diplomats, including unissued draft documents authored by then–Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, private accounts of meetings by UN officials, and internal reports marked as confidential. Lichner also provided insight and guidance on internal UN processes and deliberations related to Israel, including informing them of scrutiny of its conduct in Gaza and the West Bank.
UN officials are subject to rules defining staff as international civil servants whose responsibilities are “not national but exclusively international.” The organization’s internal guidelines also strictly prohibit officials from communicating information to any “government, entity, person or any other source any information known to them by reason of their official position.”
A former senior UN official confirmed that the behavior documented in the emails is expressly prohibited by UN guidelines.
“When you join the UN you are bound to serve the UN rather than the country you came from, and as such you are bound to promote the interests of the organization. You sign a piece of paper acknowledging that you have become a UN official and, as a result, are bound to confidentiality and serving the interests of the organization rather than a member state,” Charles Petrie, a former senior UN diplomat and Assistant Secretary-General, told Drop Site News. “But there are no systems in the UN to impose consequences for leaking information. In the U.S. government, when you leak, you are actually committing a crime because you have accepted the conditions under which you are able to access different levels. That does not exist at the UN.”
He added, “It is a sign of an institution that does not have internal accountability. And the higher you go, the less accountability there is.”
Lichner, Prosor, and Power did not respond to detailed requests for comment. UNICEF did not respond to a request for comment.
Strictly ConfidentialOn November 10, 2014, Lichner received an internal daily report from the UN Operations and Crisis Centre (UNOCC) providing security and political updates from various regions of the world. The report was marked, “UN STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL - NOT FOR FURTHER DISSEMINATION,” citing the UN’s information classification rules and with an additional note in the body further emphasizing that the report is “sensitive and the Chef de Cabinet has directed that it not be disseminated further,” a reference to Ban Ki-moon’s chief of staff.
Lichner forwarded the report the next morning to six Israeli diplomats with the comment, “For your eyes only,” pointing to a segment on civilian casualties from U.S. operations in Iraq and opining that, “there are no statements of condemnation from the Secretary-General and no commissions of inquiry into harm to innocent people”—an evident contrast to the focus at the time on Israel’s actions in Gaza by the organization.
The UNOCC report was a roundup of assessments from different conflict hotspots and classified confidential. The archive communications do not indicate whether any of its contents were useful to Israeli diplomats.
But other communications in the archive suggest the information that Lichner provided to the Israeli government was useful in their efforts to resist pressure from the international community over the 2014 war in Gaza and the ongoing occupation of the West Bank, including shaping the communications of senior UN officials to whom Lichner had privileged access.
A few months earlier, on July 4, 2014, writing from his UNFPA account, Lichner had sent five Israeli diplomats what he called “the UN internal/confidential weekly report on Jordan.” The document contained accounts of closed consultations with Jordan’s interior minister, border-security developments, and domestic unrest.
Five days later—one day after Israel launched Operation Protective Edge in Gaza—Lichner supplied Prosor, Deputy Ambassador David Roet, and three other mission officials with two additional documents: a letter Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas had sent Ban Ki-moon and an unpublished draft of the UN chief’s reply.
The letter from Ban was still a work in progress and Lichner indicated to Israeli diplomats that he was helping shape it from the inside to be more favorable to Israel’s concerns. Lichner wrote that he was working with an unnamed female “friend” privy to internal deliberations at the organization—a formulation that comes up frequently in the emails—to improve the draft “as much as possible.”
“For your eyes,” Lichner wrote. “I am working with our friend on improvements to the Secretary-General’s letter, as much as possible.” When Roet said the draft had not arrived, Lichner sent it again. “We are working to insert a reference to the rocket fire,” he wrote, referring to rocket fire by Hamas and other Palestinian resistance groups into Israel.
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