Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has accused the previous Law and Justice (PiS) administration of having purchased the Pegasus software under an agreement which allowed the Israeli producer, NSO Group, full access to data harvested by the spyware in Poland.
Pegasus is a powerful and controversial tool that allows the extraction of large amounts of data from mobile phones without users’ knowledge. It was developed for use against terrorism and organised crime.
There have been allegations in several countries that it has been used in surveillance against political opponents of sitting governments.
In Poland, researchers at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab found Pegasus was used against figures associated with Poland’s then-opposition. Among the first cases disclosed was that of Krzysztof Brejza, a senator for Civic Platform, the party led by Tusk, whose telephone was hacked 33 times during his party’s 2019 parliamentary election campaign. He now sits in the European Parliament.
The spy software has been reported to have been used in several countries including Hungary, Czechia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania as well as India, Pakistan, Brazil**,** Mexico and Arab states such as Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.
The European Parliament’s committee of inquiry into the use of Pegasus concluded in 2023 that the spyware had formed part of what it called a system for the surveillance of the opposition and of critics of the government in Poland, and called on Warsaw to restore judicial oversight of the services.
Tusk, in a video posted on his X account, called this “a crime against the state” and “one of the biggest scandals in the history of Poland after the fall of communism**”** and said there was no doubt that the Israeli firm which sold the software and had access to the data harvested with it in Poland was connected to Israel’s secret services.
Tusk wrote in his X post: “Imagine that the people responsible for justice and national security handed over thousands, tens of thousands, of sensitive details about Polish citizens to a foreign country, Israel, without having any control over it.”
He added there was no doubt that Pegasus manufacturer NSO Group cooperated with Israeli security services.
As part of the Tusk government’s drive to hold previous PiS government officials to account it has pursued an investigation into allegations that the last government had bought Pegasus, which the parliamentary inquiry has priced at 33.4 million zloty (€7.6 million), of which 25 million zloty (€5.7 million) came from the justice ministry’s Justice Fund, and used it for surveillance of political opponents and journalists.
Tusk’s comments came in the wake of a statement released on October 12 by the National Prosecutor’s Office on the latest results of an investigation that has been ongoing since March 2024.
The investigation by prosecutors is reported to have confirmed that Pegasus allowed the harvesting of emails, instant messaging and text messages; the content of telephone conversations, both via mobile networks and internet calls; browsing histories, calendars and contact lists; photos, videos and other files; and location data.
“Additionally, Pegasus allowed the use of the device’s built-in microphone and cameras to record audio and video in real time and take screenshots,” reports the National Prosecutor’s Office.
But what was most concerning, in the prosecutors’ view was that Poland’s Central Anticorruption Bureau (CBA), which used the Pegasus system, “did not have complete control over the operation of the system,” a spokesman for the prosecution service said, citing analysis by experts from the country’s ABW domestic security and counterintelligence agency.
Furthermore, the Israeli NSO Group could access the infrastructure used to process and store operational data, and data transmitted by the system was leaving Polish territory, prosecutors said.
“The CBA did not have passwords to access some accounts with administrative privileges and some system components remained under the control of the manufacturer [NSO],” wrote the prosecutor’s office. “The server module responsible for infecting mobile devices remained under the manufacturer’s exclusive control.”
Data transmitted through the Pegasus system travelled outside Polish territory, through “servers located in various parts of the world”, in a network managed by NSO and “beyond the CBA’s control”, found the experts.
Meanwhile, NSO “had technical access to materials from operational surveillance”, although prosecutors say that the experts “did not determine whether the manufacturer actually obtained access to materials from specific operations”.
Tusk’s justice minister Waldemar Żurek responded to the prosecutors’ revelations saying that: “this wasn’t a fight against crime. This was endangering the security” of Poland.
Later on October 12 a parliamentary committee set up by the ruling coalition to investigate the use of Pegasus also revealed unclassified sections of a report on its findings**, drawn up over two years of hearings**.
In addition to the information released by prosecutors, the commission also said that the CBA had never obtained the required IT security accreditation for Pegasus**, and had never applied for it,** meaning that it was used without meeting requirements for protecting classified information.
The committee also said several security institutions had raised objections or serious concerns about the planned purchase in 2017, including the Internal Security Agency and the Military Counterintelligence Service (SKW), which declined to take part in it, and that Pegasus could not be used against numbers registered in Russia, China, North Korea or Belarus.
Committee chairwoman Magdalena Sroka said the services had turned the system on judges, prosecutors, local government figures and opposition politicians rather than on criminals, and that the State had been run “like a private fiefdom”.
Former CBA chief Ernest Bejda disputed these findings, denying that Israeli authorities had obtained Polish surveillance data. He argued that the CBA had full control of the data and that there was never any evidence of it having been used by NSO.
The controversy surrounding the purchase and use of Pegasus has embroiled senior figures from the justice ministry including the former justice minister Zbigniew Ziobro.
In October 2025, a former deputy justice minister from the PiS government, Michał Woś, was indicted over his role in the alleged illegal use of justice ministry funds to help the CBA purchase Pegasus. The committee has also prepared notifications of suspected offences against 11 people, among them Ziobro, former interior minister Mariusz Kamiński and his deputy Maciej Wąsik.
People believed to have been surveilled by the software, which can gain access to mobile devices and extract data including text messages, browsing history and GPS location data, as well as accessing microphones and cameras, include opposition MPs, public officials and journalists. Then justice minister Adam Bodnar told parliament in April 2024 that 578 people had been targeted between 2017 and 2022.
Though, according to officials in the last PiS government which purchased Pegasus from NSO in 2017, of the several hundred people investigated with the use of the software only a small number were opposition politicians.
Former justice minister Zbigniew Ziobro and other key members of the former PiS government claim that buying Pegasus was essential for Poland’s national security and deny any wrongdoing.
PiS figures have also denied that the prime minister’s wife and daughter were targets, as Tusk claimed on October 22, 2025. They say the two were recorded in telephone conversations with the family lawyer Roman Giertych, now a Civic Coalition (KO) MP, who was at the time being investigated over alleged money laundering, charges that were dropped in 2025.
All the investigations made with the use of Pegasus took place after authorisation had been obtained through a judge. Though some judges have since claimed they were not aware of the Pegasus software’s capabilities**, and the committee found that courts had not been told the system could take over the entire contents of a telephone**.
The Pegasus revelations add another complication to Polish-Israeli relations, already strained by disagreements over Israel’s conduct in Gaza and its policies towards the Palestinians.
On August 21, Poland summoned Israel’s ambassador after Israeli military authorities discontinued their investigation into the 2024 killing of Polish aid worker Damian Soból in Gaza. Warsaw also condemned Israel’s seizure of a United Nations facility in East Jerusalem.
On September 8, Poland joined 11 other countries, including Britain and France, in declaring their intention to introduce, support, or consider restrictions on trade with Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
Yet Poland continues to purchase Israeli defence systems, illustrating the competing political and military considerations that shape European arms procurement.
In July 2025, Poland signed a contract worth approximately 430 million zloty (€98 million) for 18 coastal-surveillance radars from Elta, a subsidiary of Israel Aerospace Industries, in a consortium with the Polish company KenBIT, to detect ships and low-flying threats over the Baltic Sea. Deliveries are scheduled between 2027 and 2030.
Polish forces also use Israeli-designed Spike anti-tank missiles manufactured under licence by the Polish company Mesko.
But the revelations about Pegasus are mainly intended for a domestic audience. The Tusk government has issued a raft of indictments against former PiS government officials.
The most prominent is the one issued against Ziobro for having allegedly led an organised crime group of officials in the justice ministry that misappropriated millions from the Justice Fund, among others for the purchase of Pegasus.
The original objective of the Justice Fund was to aid the victims of crime, but during the lifetime of the last PiS government (2015-2023) that was broadened to include the prevention of crime. Ziobro and his allies argue that the law was followed to the letter with regard to disbursement of public funds and argue that they have been the subject of a political witch hunt orchestrated by Tusk.
Ziobro himself left the country at the end of 2025 and claimed asylum in Hungary arguing that he could not expect a fair trial in Poland and that recovering from cancer he did not want to risk his life by being put in temporary detention that the government wanted to impose on him.
Hungary withdrew his refugee status on July 2, 2026. He has since moved to the US, where he works as a commentator for the conservative broadcaster TV Republika.
