Netanyahu: NSA spying on Israel ‘not acceptable’

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday criticized U.S. spying on Israel, becoming the latest world leader to take aim at the National Security Agency’s surveillance activities.

Documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden to The Guardian and others on Friday showed that the NSA and Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters had targeted an email address for then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in 2009, as well as the Israeli defense minister.

{mosads}Netanyahu said Monday the spying was not the kind of thing countries with close ties should do.

“With regard to things published in the past few days, I have asked for an examination of the matter,” Netanyahu said in broadcast remarks to his Likud Party, according to Reuters.

“In the close ties between Israel and the United States, there are things that must not be done and that are not acceptable to us,” he said.

Netanyahu did not say whether he would ask the United States or Britain for clarifications on the spying.

The latest disclosures from Snowden follow outrage over NSA spying on foreign leaders in other countries, most notably Germany and Brazil.

Some Israeli officials over the weekend said the latest disclosure should prompt Netanyahu to push for the release of Jonathan Pollard, a former U.S. Navy intelligence analyst who was sentenced to a life term in 1987 for spying for Israel.

Netanyahu said in a statement Sunday he did not need a “special occasion” to press Pollard’s case with the United States, according to Reuters.