Colombia’s outgoing president accuses Israel of hacking the election
Colombian President Gustavo Petro has accused Israel of interfering in the country’s presidential election, alleging that Israeli operatives compromised the vote-counting software and demanding a full audit and nationwide recount.
The accusation, delivered in a series of posts on X on Sunday, plunges Colombia into a political crisis just as the country was preparing to learn the identity of its next leader. Preliminary results showed right-wing outsider Abelardo de la Espriella with 49.3 percent of the vote, against 49 percent for left-wing senator Gustavo Bolivar Cepeda, Petro’s preferred successor. De la Espriella, a populist who ran on a law-and-order platform and close alignment with the United States, was endorsed by President Trump during the campaign. Israeli ministers in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government praised his victory. The margin is too narrow to declare a winner until the official scrutiny process is completed.
Petro’s claim centers on changes to the IP addresses of servers linked to Colombia’s national registry. “This means that the software was compromised and others wrote data for polling stations and voting posts,” he wrote. Then came the direct accusation: “The only entity in the world capable of doing that is the state of Israel.”
The allegation does not come from nowhere. Weeks before Colombia’s runoff, French prosecutors opened an investigation into suspected foreign interference by BlackCore, an Israeli cyber and influence firm whose operations reportedly targeted left-wing candidates from La France Insoumise in French local elections. French authorities have linked BlackCore to digital manipulation campaigns in France, Scotland, New York City, Angola, and Togo, though they have not identified who commissioned the operations. But the pattern Petro describes: manipulation of electoral software, server intrusions, and digital influence campaigns, matches the BlackCore playbook documented by French authorities and journalists.
Petro’s accusations go beyond the cyber dimension. He also claimed that lawyers from his coalition were blocked from entering the main vote-counting center in Bogota and that unsigned E14 polling forms were uploaded by election authorities. His coalition plans to challenge results from more than 30,000 voting stations.
The political context matters. Petro is a leftist who has been sharply critical of Israel throughout the Gaza war, comparing Israeli operations to the Nazi regime and cutting diplomatic ties. His preferred candidate lost to a right-wing contender who was backed by President Trump and praised by ministers in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. The alignment of Trump, Netanyahu, and de la Espriella gives Petro’s claim a political logic that extends beyond the technical evidence.
Whether the accusation is true is a separate question. Colombia’s attorney general has dismissed the allegations. Electoral authorities have not publicly responded. And no independent verification of Petro’s claims has been produced. De la Espriella’s camp has dismissed the accusations as the desperate moves of a defeated administration trying to hold onto power.
But the accusation itself has consequences. It feeds a growing global pattern of concern about Israeli cyber firms operating in foreign elections. The French investigation into BlackCore has already put Israel’s role in digital influence campaigns under scrutiny. Colombia adds a second case in the same month.
For the international community, the question is whether these allegations will be investigated seriously or dismissed as the sour grapes of a departing president. A full forensic audit of Colombia’s electoral software and a transparent recount process would answer that question. Anything less leaves the accusation hanging. It sets a precedent that election interference can be alleged with impunity on one side, and denied without investigation on the other.
- George, 1ban.news