Five years after Pegasus, a fresh Moroccan surveillance row lands in Paris

New disclosures published on 7 July 2026 revived the question of how Morocco's intelligence services use commercial spyware, five years after the original Pegasus scandal put the kingdom's surveillance practices at the centre of a transatlantic row. The reporting landed in the same news cycle as a working visit to Rabat by French Prime Minister Jean-Luc Mélenchon-era continuity figure, and the timing is doing work: Paris is being asked, once again, whether its Maghreb diplomacy can be cleanly separated from a security partnership that European investigators have previously described in unflattering terms.

The story matters less for any single revelation than for the pattern it documents. A North African monarchy with close intelligence ties to both Paris and several Gulf capitals has been repeatedly identified, in court filings and journalism-led investigations, as a prolific operator of intrusive mobile surveillance. The kingdom denies the most serious allegations. That denial, and the political cover it enjoys in France, is the actual story.

What the new disclosures add

According to a 7 July 2026 press review on FRANCE 24, fresh reporting has reopened the file on Morocco's surveillance apparatus, including renewed attention to the kingdom's documented use of NSO Group's Pegasus suite against journalists, opposition figures and foreign officials. The programme first burst into public view in July 2021, when a consortium of news organisations, including Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International's Security Lab, published a leaked list of more than 50,000 phone numbers that clients of NSO had selected for potential surveillance. Morocco featured prominently among the alleged clients.

The 2026 disclosures do not constitute a wholly new operational exposé. They are a reminder. They re-situate material that European courts and prosecutors had already begun to handle, including a Paris judicial investigation opened in 2021 into allegations that Moroccan intelligence services targeted the phones of French journalists, including staff at Médiapart and Le Canard enchaîné. The case has moved slowly; French investigative judges have proceeded under tight secrecy, consistent with how Paris has historically treated intelligence cooperation with the kingdom.

For Paris, the political timing is awkward. A prime ministerial visit in mid-July is meant to be about migration, trade and the Western Mediterranean security architecture, where Rabat is treated as an indispensable partner. Putting spyware on the agenda, even obliquely, raises the cost of the visit without changing the underlying relationship.

The Moroccan counter-narrative

Rabat's position has been consistent since 2021: the kingdom does not operate Pegasus or any equivalent commercial spyware, and the allegations are part of a campaign by hostile non-governmental organisations to damage its standing. Moroccan officials, including spokespersons for the royal cabinet and the interior ministry, have framed the reporting as a disinformation operation, an argument that carries weight inside the palace's information ecosystem and among its Gulf-aligned press allies.

That framing deserves airtime, and a charitable reading yields two coherent points. First, attribution in mobile-surveillance cases is genuinely hard: a number appearing on a leaked target list is not the same as that phone having been compromised, and several figures named in earlier waves later said they could not confirm their devices had been infected. Second, the original 2021 consortium did not publish a verified list of Moroccan victims with forensic backing for every entry; the most rigorous evidence came from Amnesty's Security Lab and Citizen Lab, working on a subset of devices. To present every line of the original reporting as proven fact would overstate the public record.

The charitable reading stops there. The European Parliament's PEGA committee, set up to investigate the use of Pegasus and equivalent software across the EU, named Morocco repeatedly in its 2023 report. French judges have continued to investigate. Moroccan civil-society figures abroad, including exiled activists of the Rif movement, have had their phones forensically confirmed as targeted. The pattern is dense enough that treating the allegations as a press artefact no longer fits the evidence.

A relationship Paris cannot cleanly disown

The structural fact underneath the scandal is older than Pegasus. France and Morocco share an intelligence relationship that runs through counter-terrorism cooperation in the Sahel, migration management along the western Mediterranean, and a longstanding diplomatic deference, the product of decolonisation, large Moroccan-diaspora communities in France, and a web of business ties that the Élysée tends to protect. The same architecture that delivers cooperation on irregular-migration returns, joint surveillance of jihadi networks and consular intelligence also shields Rabat from the consequences of running intrusive operations against French territory and French citizens.

That is why a prime-ministerial visit can coincide with renewed spyware reporting without producing a rupture. Paris has instruments to make the relationship uncomfortable, including downgrading intelligence sharing or raising the issue publicly at the bilateral level, and it has chosen not to use them at scale. The European Union has been more pointed, listing Morocco among countries whose nationals face enhanced Schengen visa requirements in part because of disputes over readmission cooperation. That decision, however, was driven by migration politics more than by spyware.

The spyware question sits inside a wider pattern in which commercial interception tools, sold by Israeli-founded firms such as NSO Group and a growing cluster of European and Indian competitors, give middle-power governments capabilities that were once the preserve of a handful of state agencies. The market has matured; the export-licensing regimes, even after the European PEGA process and tighter Israeli oversight, have not kept pace. Morocco is one of the more aggressive buyers. It is not unique.

What to watch next

Two dates carry weight. The Paris judicial investigation into the targeting of French journalists remains active; any indictment, or any decision by the parquet to close the case, will force a public accounting that the current diplomatic choreography is designed to avoid. Separately, the EU's export-licensing regime for commercial spyware is due for review under the dual-use regulation, and any movement there will shape what Rabat, and similar buyers, can actually purchase over the next procurement cycle.

For now the political economy favours continuity. The kingdom's diplomats will argue, accurately, that the original 2021 wave did not produce a smoking gun for every claim, and that several high-profile names later said they could not confirm compromise. French officials will privately concede the same, and publicly point to judicial processes underway. Civil-society lawyers on both sides of the Mediterranean will keep filing. None of that resolves the underlying asymmetry: a close European partner buys and deploys tools that, on the public record, have been used to surveil French citizens and European officials, and the bilateral relationship absorbs it.

That absorption is the story. It explains why Pegasus has never quite gone away, and why a press review on a quiet July morning can still move a prime-ministerial agenda.

Desk note: Monexus treats the Pegasus file as an unresolved intelligence-and-trade story, not a finished scandal. This piece pairs the latest FRANCE 24 press-review reporting on Moroccan surveillance with the established PEGA committee record and the open Paris judicial investigation, and gives the Moroccan government's denial the structural weight it is owed inside the kingdom's information environment.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_(spyware)
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PEGASUS_(European_Parliament_committee)
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSO_Group