The meeting was a rare public acknowledgement of the central role that the secretive spy agency played during the pandemic.

Early on during the COVID-19 outbreak, it was reported that the intelligence agencies of Israel were playing an increasingly important role in the Jewish state’s effort to combat the effects of the coronavirus in its territory. In an uncharacteristic move, the government went out of its way to advertise the participation of its secretive spy agencies in the national effort to limit the spread of the virus.

In a television interview, an unnamed official for Israel’s external intelligence agency, the Mossad, said the agency had managed to secure 100,000 coronavirus testing kits, 25,000 N-95 masks and 100 ventilators. The material had been acquired “from unnamed countries” by Mossad officers, he said. The officers had to “race to [foreign] factories” and secure these critical supplies after they had been “ordered by other countries”, he added. The agents then had to coordinate secret airlifts so that the medical material could be transported to Israel in time.

But many of the coronavirus testing kits procured by the Mossad turned out to be incomplete. According to local media reports, when the kits arrived in Israel from “an unidentified Gulf state”, scientists realized that they were useless. That was because they arrived without the chemical reagents that were required to carry out complete tests on subjects. These reagents were eventually procured from South Korea and arrived in Israel nearly a month later, when demand for them was far less urgent. The Mossad was heavily criticized for this operation.

But last weekend, Prime Minister Netanyahu publicly thanked the Mossad director for leading the nation’s Joint Procurement Command Center during the COVID-19 pandemic. He told Director Cohen that he had carried out his tasks “exceptionally well [and] the results speak for themselves”. The meeting took place to mark the return of the procurement centers’ command to the Ministry of Health. But the Mossad may be asked to step in again, said Netanyahu: “we are currently passing the torch”, said the prime minister. However, “we do not know what the next day, or the next month, will bring. Since you have acquired the experience, remember it, we may need it again”, he told Cohen.