This type of analysis is kind of hard, because you could also say that Israel's enemies would benefit a lot from this sort of thing being discovered.
And if it's their enemies are behind the hack and then are adding false information to hurt Israel, there are so many better targets. Any US journalist critical of Israel for example.
> Any US journalist critical of Israel for example.
But if you do that, NSA becomes involved, much easier to get discovered. It also fits with the narrative a bit better to make the target a Palestinian human rights activist.
On the whole though, i do think its more likely that Israel is behind this, i'm just exploring this from the perspective of who could potentially benefit.
Not just more likely, but overwhelmingly more likely.
You are clearly not weighing the facts in a neutral manner if you think a false flag by Hamas (?) using an Israeli security company's exploit to hack Palestinian activists has any substantial possibility of being what occurred.
I think you're overestimating how much the NSA saying "no no, the NSO Group didn't spy on the US, it was planted by those tricksy Iranians" would diminish the story.
I also disagree that Israel is particularly vulnerable to negative PR right now. I somewhat wonder if you're just noticing more stories critical of them because the latest event is tech related.
I was using it in the modern usage, as in:
> The term today extends to include countries that organize attacks on themselves and make the attacks appear to be by enemy nations or terrorists, thus giving the nation that was supposedly attacked a pretext for domestic repression and foreign military aggression.
This article is clearly using false flag to mean proxy conflicts, which I don't think is the colloquial understanding of the term.