Hacked Emails Show UN Population Fund Official Fed Classified Documents to Israeli Diplomats

A UN official spent two years quietly funneling classified UN documents to Israeli diplomats, according to a hacked email archive reviewed by Drop Site News. That official now directs UNICEF's Washington office.

The emails, drawn from the hacked account of former Israeli UN Ambassador Ron Prosor, show Yahav Lichner, then an official at the UN Population Fund, repeatedly sending Israeli diplomats internal reports marked confidential, private accounts of high-level UN meetings, and even unreleased draft documents from the Secretary-General's office.

"For your eyes only"

On February 20, 2015, Lichner sent Prosor and diplomat Ronny Leshno-Yaar a document he described as a "classified internal summary" of a Washington trip by Zeid Ra'ad Al-Hussein, then UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. "For your eyes only. Do not forward," he wrote.

The timing was not incidental. Israel was then facing a UN Human Rights Council inquiry into its conduct during the 2014 Gaza offensive. The leaked summary detailed Al-Hussein's private meetings with White House officials, senators, congressional staff, AIPAC and J Street, and noted internal concern that congressional anger over the Gaza inquiry could jeopardize U.S. funding for his office.

Leshno-Yaar's reply made clear the intelligence would be put to use. "I have no choice and of course without addressing this information I must act with members of Congress to make them understand," he wrote, before laying out arguments he planned to raise about Al-Hussein and the Gaza inquiry's secretariat. Lichner responded, "Absolutely. You are right."

A pattern, not an incident

According to the archive, this was one exchange among many. On November 11, 2014, Lichner forwarded six Israeli diplomats a UN Operations and Crisis Centre report explicitly marked "UN STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL, NOT FOR FURTHER DISSEMINATION," again labeling it "for your eyes only." Other emails describe him passing along a confidential internal report on Jordan from closed-door consultations with that country's interior minister, and unpublished draft material authored by then-Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, including a draft reply to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

UN staff are bound by rules that classify them as international civil servants whose duties are, in the organization's own language, "not national but exclusively international." Internal guidelines bar officials from disclosing information gained through their position to any government or outside entity.

Charles Petrie, a former UN Assistant Secretary-General, told Drop Site the conduct described in the emails plainly violates those rules, and that the UN has no real mechanism to punish it. "There are no systems in the UN to impose consequences for leaking information," he said, contrasting it with U.S. government leak laws. "It is a sign of an institution that does not have internal accountability. And the higher you go, the less accountability there is."

From Israel's mission to UNICEF's front door

Lichner is not an outsider who wandered into a UN post. He worked at Israel's mission to the UN from 2011 to early 2014 as Prosor's political advisor, before moving to the UN Population Fund. The emails suggest Prosor personally lobbied for Lichner's UNFPA appointment, with help from then-U.S. Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power, and later wrote him a reference letter.

Since January 2025, Lichner has directed UNICEF's Washington, D.C. office, a position that puts him at the center of the agency's U.S. government and congressional relations. The hacked emails date to his earlier UNFPA tenure and do not show whether the same conduct has continued at UNICEF.

Lichner, Prosor, and Power did not respond to requests for comment. UNICEF also did not respond.

Where the emails came from

The archive was obtained by Handala, a hacking group believed to have ties to Iranian intelligence, and published by the whistleblower site Distributed Denial of Secrets. That provenance means the material should be read with appropriate caution about motive and selective release, even as the specific, dated exchanges described here carry internal consistency and have not been disputed by the parties named.

Why it matters

The case illustrates something broader than one leaker's career. It shows a foreign government's diplomats cultivating and benefiting from a source embedded inside a UN agency tasked with acting in the interest of the international community, not any single state. And it shows that source advancing into a more senior UN post overseeing relations with the U.S. government, the very audience his earlier leaks were used to lobby.