Israel spied on the US secretary of state, John Kerry, during peace talks with Palestinians and Arab states last year, the magazine Der Spiegel has reported.
The German weekly said on Sunday that Israeli intelligence and at least one other secret service intercepted Kerry’s phone calls during a doomed, nine-month effort to broker a peace deal.
If confirmed, the report will further sour the diplomat’s relationship with Binyamin Netanyahu’s government and raise fresh questions about the vulnerability of phone communications to eavesdropping.
There was no immediate reaction from Jerusalem or Washington. The State Department did not respond to a request for comment.
The report was published on another bloody day in Gaza, where a projectile hit a street outside a school where people were sheltering, killing at least seven and wounding dozens, many of whom were buying sweets and biscuits from stalls.
The UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, called the attack a "moral outrage and a criminal act" and said the Israel Defence Forces had been repeatedly informed of the location of civilian shelters.
Citing "several intelligence sources", Der Spiegel said Israeli spies and an unidentified intelligence agency listened in on Kerry’s talks with high-ranking officials from Israel, the Palestinian territories and Arab states. Some calls were allegedly made on normal phones and were not encrypted.
"The government in Jerusalem then used the information obtained in international negotiations aiming to reach a diplomatic solution in the Middle East," it said.
Kerry invested his authority in the ambitious attempt to relaunch moribund Middle East diplomacy last year and persuaded Netanyahu and the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, to resume negotiations. The effort fizzled out in April, with each side accusing the other of bad faith.
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