On September 10, 2026, Gur Megiddo, one of Israel’s leading investigative journalists, announced that he was leaving TheMarker. He explained in a post:“Over the past 12 years, I have watched the place of facts steadily decline. I entered this profession at a time when it was already in decline. And yet, I had many good years when facts were enough to prompt an investigation, bring someone to trial, prevent an appointment or thwart a bad decision. As long as the facts I published set processes in motion, there was enormous satisfaction in it. All that remains is to miss it. Israeli society has fallen ill, human society has fallen ill and social media has poisoned the information environment beyond anything I could have imagined.”Megiddo did not yet know that, just a month later, one of the most impressive investigations he had conducted would meet the same fate. The investigation was part of the Story Killers project, coordinated by the Paris-based organisation Forbidden Stories and dedicated to the memory of journalist Gauri Lankesh, who was murdered in Bengaluru in 2017 following an online campaign of incitement and disinformation against her, particularly by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).Lankesh regarded the fight against fake news spread by the BJP as a major part of the struggle against India’s far right.On February 15, 2023, I asked the State Attorney and the Police Commissioner to open a criminal investigation following Megiddo’s investigation, which revealed that an Israeli citizen named Tal Hanan, together with other Israelis, had for several years operated from his office in Modi’in, central Israel, a project involving cyber hacking, forgery and fraud designed to disrupt democratic processes around the world.Megiddo’s extraordinary investigation included explicit admissions by Hanan, documents, presentations and videos, as well as verification that the actions Hanan boasted about had in fact been carried out.Among other things, Hanan explained how he ran disinformation campaigns using tens of thousands of fake accounts ready for deployment. He hacked into Telegram and Gmail accounts in Kenya and Mozambique in front of the journalists’ eyes, claimed that he added “a little salt and pepper” in the form of forged documents or emails that generated material to be leaked later, and he had demonstrated how he personally sent fake messages from hacked accounts and explained that he could open “a leaks website, in the style of WikiLeaks, and there you can publish anything. It doesn’t matter what. Pictures, receipts, emails.”Hanan also took responsibility for a cyberattack carried out against the backdrop of the referendum on Catalan independence and for a cyberattack on the computers of Indonesia’s General Elections Commission. He admitted that he was behind an attack that disabled the phones of Nigeria’s opposition leaders.He presented documents that appeared to contain confidential banking information about a Mongolian politician and claimed to have hacked into the email account of the chief of staff to the former prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago and leaked a document from it in an attempt to trigger a political crisis.In the complaint, I asked that Hanan and his Israeli associates be investigated on suspicion of a range of offences, including fraud and extortion, deception and impersonation, forgery and election interference, as well as multiple offences under Israel’s Computers Law, including disrupting or interfering with a computer or computer material, introducing false information, and unlawfully accessing computer material in order to carry out prohibited operations using software.In addition, given the gravity, scope and systematic nature of the activities exposed by Megiddo’s investigation, I asked that Hanan and his Israeli associates also be investigated on suspicion of offences under Israel’s Anti-Organised Crime Law.Given the evidence exposed by Megiddo and submitted by me to the police’s Investigations and Intelligence Division, as well as Hanan’s explicit admissions concerning his actions and intentions, it appeared that the elements of the aforementioned offences had been met and that the prosecution was under an obligation to indict him.Nevertheless, on October 25, 2026 – roughly three years and eight months after the complaint was filed – the Cybercrime Division of the State Attorney’s Office tersely informed me that, after the police investigation file had been examined by the prosecution, “the decision was made to close it”. Following the closure of the case, I filed an appeal, on which a decision is expected only after several more years.Under these circumstances, when there is evidence in documents, videos, presentations and explicit admissions, and when there is also an unequivocal public interest involved, the decision to close the case is highly perplexing and raises concerns that it may have resulted from extraneous considerations, such as Hanan’s background and connections to Israel’s security establishment.Megiddo revealed that Hanan had been active in the security business long before there were social media platforms on which to operate avatars. Among other things, in 1999, he founded a company that was registered at his home address in Modi’in. Its website stated that it was engaged in “fighting terrorism” and “training forces” and that it had previously held a defence-export license from Israel’s defence ministry.Megiddo also quoted a former senior Israeli intelligence official who had been exposed to Hanan’s activities and said, “I have no idea how Hanan worked his way into this position…I know he has connections with very senior and serious people in the intelligence agencies in Israel and the United States.”As is well known, in recent years, Israel and Israeli citizens have been embroiled in a long series of scandals involving defence exports and security, cyber, disinformation and intelligence services provided by Israelis abroad. The closure of the investigation into Hanan provides further evidence for those who argue that these are not isolated problems or exceptional incidents, but rather reflect a deeper reality: that Israel is, in essence, a “rogue state” whose regulatory and law-enforcement authorities are themselves involved in such affairs or prefer to turn a blind eye to them.No other country is known to have initiated and concluded proceedings against Hanan following Megiddo’s investigation. As Megiddo wrote in his post announcing his departure from TheMarker, facts are no longer enough to prompt authorities to open investigations and bring charges, and social media has poisoned the information environment beyond recognition. Israeli society, like human society more broadly, has fallen ill.Although Megiddo is not wrong in his assessment of reality and the state of journalism, it is unbearable to imagine a world without journalists who carry on Gauri Lankesh’s legacy, challenging vested interests and power structures and exposing their manipulation, immorality and corruption.Even when investigative journalists cannot change reality because the forces they confront are too powerful, their work remains essential to preserving our humanity and keeping the flame of truth and resistance alive until the day it burns brightly once again and prevails.Eitay Mack is an Israeli lawyer and human rights activist.