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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,........

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