Israeli government officials have raids at the offices of NSO Group, a surveillance outfit, in response to the Pegasus project allegaions investigation into abuses of the firm's spyware by several government clients globally. On Wednesday, the defence ministry officials inspected the company’s offices near Tel Aviv.

Meanwhile, Israeli defence minister, Benny Gantz, at the same time arrived for a pre-arranged visit to Paris. During the visit, he discussed issues regarding Pegasus revealations with his French counterpart. The visit comes as the phone number of the the French president, Emmanuel Macron appeared on a leaked database which contains 50,000 numbers that are believed to be selected for possible surveillance by clients of NSO. Emmanuel Macron,the French president is one of the highest profile figures who is on the pegasus database list.

After the media reports of snooping, last week Macron spoke to Israeli prime minister, Naftali Bennett stressing the importance of a proper investigation about the project's findings.

According to the media reports, defece authorities carried out an inspection at the NSO’s offices, but the company officials said that the authorities had “visited” and did not conduct any raids at the premises in their official statemetn. NSO officials further said they had been informed in advance that the defence ministry officials will be coming to check the commercial exports of sensitive cyber-exports  and would be doing an formal inspection. “NSO is working in a full transparency mode with the Israeli authorities,” the statement added.

Recently, a global collaborative media consortium's investigative project has revealed that the NSO's Pegasus spyware was used to target more than 300 mobile phone numbers in India. The list includes Ministers in the indian government, a constitutional authority, various Opposition leaders and several journalists and business persons.

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