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Ex-Mossad chief: Israeli intelligence has ‘saved many lives’ in the UK
Yossi Cohen: 'I think that the UK has to be super supportive to the State of Israel, as we had been to you when you had suffered terrorism on your lands'
A former chief of the Mossad has claimed that the Israeli intelligence agency had “saved many, many lives on British soil”, and that a director general of MI5 had thanked him personally for having “disrupted a huge quantity of terror activity inside the UK”.
In an interview with The General and The Journalist, a podcast produced by The Times, Yossi Cohen, who served as Mossad’s chief from 2016-2021, appeared to criticise efforts from the British government to distance itself from Israel. Recently Prime Minister Andy Burnham publicly apologised for his Labour’s actions in late 2023, saying: “I know many people feel that at the start of Israel’s military action in Gaza, my party didn’t get it right and I am sorry about that. The response has too often not been good enough. We need to do better.”
Cohen’s response was that “criticism is OK, but opposing what we’re doing is not OK. The State of Israel never initiated this war in Gaza. The terrorists did, Hamas and Islamic Jihad did.
“We had been countering that for many years, not only inside Gaza, but internationally.”
It is well known that Britain and Israel have shared intelligence with each other for many years; but it is rare to hear such a high ranking former intelligence officer discussing it. Cohen told the podcast that “I quote your former director of MI5 who said, ‘Yossi, you deserve the Oscar for what you did here. You have disrupted a huge quantity of terror activity inside the UK. Thank you very much for doing it’. I think that the UK government should do exactly the same. I think that the UK has to be super supportive to the State of Israel, as we had been to you when you had suffered terrorism on your lands.”
Cohen joined Mossad in 1982, while studying at university in London after completing his army service. His initial codename in Mossad was “Callan”, after a British TV spy series which ran between 1967 and 1972, which Cohen was a fan of. In four decades at the intelligence agency, Cohen rose through the ranks, becoming the head of the organisation’s Tzomet division, responsible for international espionage and running agents, before becoming the agency’s deputy director and ultimately its most senior representative.
The Israeli told The Times podcast: “The UK government should understand that we read what they do. And you do have a huge local problem in the UK today. It is not safe to walk on London streets or in Manchester if you’re Jewish.
“So I do understand politics. And when your prime ministers are communicating to your own audience, saying, ‘Yes, we will counter Israel and they’re doing genocide in Gaza, blah, blah, blah’, this is eventually super poor politics.
“It is not respecting what the State of Israel is actually doing, not only for us, but for UK citizens too.”
No UK Prime Minister has accused Israel of genocide in Gaza, with Andy Burnham saying it would be down to an international court to ascertain such a charge. In 2025, lawyers for the British government said that they had seen no evidence that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, and that “no evidence has been seen that Israel is deliberately targeting civilian women or children. There is also evidence of Israel making efforts to limit incidental harm to civilians.”
In a 2025 talk at JW3, London key Jewish community centre, about his newly published book, The Sword of Freedom, Cohen condemned the then-recent decision of the British government to recognise a Palestinian state as “in-between unreliable and ridiculous”. He noted that Britain had abstained during the 1947 UN vote on the partition of what had been the Mandate of Palestine, and joked that ““we miss the days when Britain didn’t have an opinion about us.”
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