BEIRUT — On the 60th anniversary of his execution, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, showed off the alleged achievement of recovering 2,500 documents of Mossad agent Eli Cohen, to his opponents who are relentlessly trying to bring down his government due to its failure in Gaza.

Netanyahu claimed that his forces accomplished “secret and complex operation carried out in cooperation with a strategic intelligence agency partner, during which the official Syrian archives related to Eli Cohen were transferred to ‘Israel’.”

Cohen had entered Syria under the name Kamel Amin Thabet, claiming to be a businessman and a member of a Syrian family that had immigrated to Latin America. 

Although the Golan Heights was a closed military zone at the time, Cohen was allowed to enter it at least three times, with the approval of the then-Syrian Chief of Staff.

After the June 1967 war, then Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol is quoted as saying,  “Had it not been for the information Cohen provided, the army would have had to recruit a larger number of brigades to fight in the Golan Heights.”

Cohen expanded his relationships with high-ranking government officials before being discovered and executed on May 18, 1965, in Marjeh Square in central Damascus.

According to iNews 24, during a private meeting attended by Netanyahu and Mossad chief David Barnea, the documents were reviewed, including the original will Cohen wrote hours before his execution. 

The Hebrew channel added that the archive transfer came after “decades of efforts by Mossad intelligence, operations, and technology personnel, in cooperation with partners in the intelligence and security community in Israel and around the world.”

The documents include forged passports, documents used by Cohen, and numerous telegrams he received from the Mossad, including an order to monitor Syrian military bases in Quneitra.

Informed Syrian sources explained that these documents were kept in the archives of the former Syrian regime’s National Security Headquarters.

The headquarters, like other security and intelligence headquarters, was not raided on the first day of the fall of Damascus, which confirms that these documents did not reach the Israeli enemy through an ordinary intermediary.

This is especially true under Syria's de facto ruler, al-Julani (known as Ahmed al-Sharaa), who is prepared to appease the Israeli enemy in every possible way. 

Strategic analysts have linked the Mossad’s acquisition of the Cohen archive to the ongoing talks between Tel Aviv and Damascus on several fronts.

In this context, Channel 12 revealed that the head of the Israeli Offensive Forces’ Operations Directorate, Major General Oded Bassiouk, recently met in Azerbaijan with representatives of the new Syrian government.

The channel confirmed that other meetings were being held in the UAE to sign a normalization agreement between the two sides, mediated by Qatar, according to Haaretz.

Diplomatic sources revealed immediately after the fall of Damascus that the Israeli enemy began investigations in an attempt to locate Cohen, as well as the body of one of three soldiers who went missing during the Battle of Sultan Yacoub in the Lebanese Bekaa Valley during the invasion in 1982. (Years earlier, Russia had handed over the bodies of the two to the Israeli enemy.)

The sources further revealed that the Israeli enemy is also interested in confiscating a collection of ancient Torah scrolls and other artifacts from Syria.

In April 2015, Walla revealed that in January 1962, Cohen sailed from Italy to Beirut, where he met a CIA agent named Majdi Sheikh al-Ard, who brought him into Syria, where he rented a house opposite the Syrian General Staff headquarters.

Cohen was born in December 1924 in Alexandria to a Jewish family that had immigrated from Aleppo to Egypt, where he worked for the Zionist movement.

In 1957, Cohen settled in the occupied Palestinian territories, where he was recruited into the Caesarea Special Forces Unit and underwent intensive training, which also included learning the Islamic religion and the Syrian dialect.

In 1961, he was sent to Argentina on a French passport, where he assumed the identity of a Syrian businessman seeking to return to his homeland, strengthening his ties with the Syrian community.

In September 2023, Yedioth Ahronoth published a report entitled “Mossad Children Speak Out About Life Under Lies,” documenting the stories of spies told by their children, who belied the official occupation propaganda that sought to portray them as “superheroes.”

Cohen’s daughter, Sophie, however, does not necessarily see them as such, but rather asserts that they “paid a heavy psychological and material price.”

The son of Israeli spy Shulamit Kishk Cohen also participates in the documentary, and he speaks about his mother's psychological tragedy after her return to the occupied Palestinian territories.

From the late 1940s to the early 1960s, Shulamit Kishik Cohen cultivated extensive relationships with Lebanese and Arab politicians. She established an art and music salon in Beirut, employing prostitutes to extract important secrets from her guests for the Haganah. She also gathered information on the training of Palestinian revolutionaries in Lebanon.

After her cover was exposed, Shula Cohen was sentenced to death, later commuted to 20 years in prison, until she was released as part of a prisoner exchange following the June 1967 War, where she was warmly received and became a Mossad legend.

Years earlier, Libyan newspapers had revealed the arrest of a Mossad agent named Benjamin Ephraim, who had infiltrated Libya posing as an imam from a mosque called Abu Hafs, where he worked to incite Libyans toward chaos and destruction. According to the Spanish newspaper El Pais, he was leading more than 200 ISIS members to carry out acts of violence and terrorism.

Observers have questioned the true identity of al-Julani, and whether he is a creation of the Mossad, recalling how Israeli hospitals treated his terrorists during the war against Syria over the past decade. Nothing definitive is known about his past or origin, despite claims that he hails from Syria and his frequent reassuring and courteous statements toward the Zionist enemy.

In any case, it does not seem that we are learning the lesson from the grave mistakes we have made with a malicious and cunning enemy that is lying in wait for us and seeking to weaken, divide, and fragment us by all means.