More details are slowly coming to light in the case of Ben Zygier, also known as Prisoner X.

A day before he committed suicide, Zygier met with outside defense attorney Avigdor Feldman, besides his meetings with his regular attorneys Roi Belcher, Moshe Mazor and Boaz Ben-Tzur. Zygier had been considering his legal options, including the possibility of a plea bargain. What the charges were is still unknown, but Feldman said the charges were very serious.

On Thursday, a Kuwaiti newspaper, Al-Jarida, claimed that Zygier was one of the members of the Mossad team which assassinated Hamas terrorist Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. But after the assassination, for some reason, Zygier contacted the Dubai authorities and gave them detailed information on the assassination. According to the paper, Zygier was then captured by Israel after he went into hiding.

What has also come to light is that Israel is not running “black prisons” as some people claimed, but rather that Zygier was kept out of contact with other prisoners and his identity was secret to those without high enough clearance for security reasons, though all the while Zygier was allowed to meet with his lawyers who were defending him against the charges being brought against him by the state of Israel.

Questions arose as to how Zygier managed to kill himself in a maximum security cell with 24 hour camera surveillance. It turns out that the cell’s bathroom is not monitored, and that is where he hung himself.

As you must have heard, Prisoner X, was kept in a secret Israeli government jail, the one previously used to hold Yigal Amir, and it’s forbidden by the censor to talk about him or his incarceration.

Here at the Muqata, we’ve uncovered the real reasons why Prisoner X was arrested.

Here they are (a joint Joe-Jameel effort):

10. He tried baking dairy Borekas in the wrong shape

9. He was clandestinely helping fund Women of the Wall

8. Arrested for protesting against the Disengagement

7. Had proof of who really killed Rabin

6. Had a Talansky envelope with Olmert’s fingerprints on it

5. Had proof Aryeh Deri really was innocent

4. Censored

3. Had dirt on why the Pope really quit

2. Had a copy of Obama’s real birth certificate And reason number 1 is…

1. Sara Netanyahu told Bibi to put him in jail

“Prisoner X,” who hanged himself in an Israeli jail in 2010, was an Australian citizen who worked for the Mossad but apparently committed a heinous crime, perhaps treason, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) reported Tuesday.

The report sent the Netanyahu government scrambling to convene an urgent meeting of Israeli editors to keep the allegations from appearing in Israeli media, Haaretz reported.

ABC named “Prisoner X” as Ben Zygier, who went by the alias of Ben Alon or Ben Allen after he moved to Israel. Zygier, or Alon or Allen, was married to an Israeli woman and had two children. He was mysteriously jailed in a super-high security wing approximately 10 years after moving to Israel.

His identity never was revealed even to prison guards, and the prisoner committed suicide at the age of 34 despite state-of-the-art surveillance systems that are installed to prevent prisoners from taking their own lives. Zygier was in the Ayalon prison wing that held Yigal Amir, who assassinated Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin.

Israel never admitted to the existence of Prisoner X even after the suicide was reported in 2010. At the time, media speculated the prisoner was a most senior enemy agent, with some suggesting that he was a senior Iranian Revolutionary Guards general.

After ABC’s report Tuesday, Haaretz told its readers that the Office of the Prime Minister called an emergency meeting of local editors “to ask its members to co-operate with the government and withhold publication of information pertaining to an incident that is very embarrassing to a certain government agency.”

ABC said it was able to identify Prisoner X through circumstantial evidence that was provided after the suicide victim’s body was sent to Melbourne a week after his death. Before then, Australia did not of his incarceration.

Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr responded to the ABC’s exposé, “Those allegations certainly do trouble me.

“It’s never been raised with me…. The difficulty is I’m advised we’ve had no contact with his family [and] there’s been no request for consular assistance during the period it’s alleged he was in prison.

“Even if Prisoner X has now been identified, his crime, however, remains a mystery although it has been widely speculated that it would have involved treachery to warrant such extreme measures.”

If the allegations are true, Israel might be subject to serious questions about due process of law.  Human Rights Watch researcher Bill van Esveld told the newspaper that there are serious issues involved concerning fundamental prisoners’ rights.

“It’s called a disappearance, and a disappearance is not only a violation of that person’s due process rights – that’s a crime,” he said. “Under international law, the people responsible for that kind of treatment actually need to be criminally prosecuted themselves.”

Hamas terror chief Khaled Mashaal openly arrived in Gaza on Friday, crossing through via Egypt.

Mashaal was met by representatives of both Hamas and Fatah.

Mashaal will be staying in Gaza for 3 days.

In 1997, Netanyahu nearly succeeded in killing Mashaal in retaliation for all the Hamas suicide bombings, but the Mossad operation in Jordan went sour, and Israel was forced to send an antidote.

Upon his arrival in Gaza, Mashaal said he wished for “God to give me martyrdom one day on this land.”

Former Mossad chief Meir Dagan’s condition is improving after contracting an infection following a liver transplant in Belarus.

Dagan is still being kept sedated and on a respirator, and is being kept in isolation to minimize his chances of additional infections.

US, German and Swedish hospitals refused to operate on Dagan, according to Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko, who gave a press conference on Tuesday.  “No one wanted to conduct this operation on a former head of the Mossad,” Lukashenko said.  Israeli officials decried Lukashenko’s conference as an attempt to get publicity for Belarus.

The mystique of the Mossad. Few can resist it. Hardly any Jew bears anything but affection and admiration for the foreign intelligence agency that produced Eli Cohen, kidnapped Adolf Eichmann, and attacked Iran’s nuclear program with a computer virus in 2009.

But how did the Mossad become so effective? And from where does it get its information? These questions and others are addressed in a new book, Spies Against Armageddon: Inside Israel’s Secret Wars. Written by veteran journalists Yossi Melman and Dan Raviv, the book traces the history of the Mossad from its inception to today. A Hebrew version of the work, Milchamot Hatzlalim, is a bestseller in Israel.

Raviv, who has served as a CBS News correspondent for over 30 years, recently spoke with The Jewish Press.

The Jewish Press: Your book relates many fascinating incidents, but a great deal of them have already appeared in other works. What exactly is new about this book?

Raviv: For one, we are the first to reveal the decision-making process behind the bombing of Syria’s nuclear reactor in 2007 and how Israel’s intelligence community discovered it.

How, indeed, did it discover it?

When Colonel Khaddafi in Libya gave up his weapons of mass destruction in a deal negotiated by the Americans and British, Israel was taken entirely by surprise. Israel didn’t know that Khaddafi had an active WMD program and didn’t know about the negotiations for him to give it up. And that was pretty embarrassing to the Mossad.

So Israeli intelligence decided to review every file they had that had anything to do with Arab countries and nuclear work. And they found that the Pakistani [nuclear scientist] A.Q. Khan, who was known to have sold nuclear equipment to many countries, had been in touch with Syria. More importantly, they discovered North Korea had been working closely with Syria.

So the Mossad turned its focus, and Israeli spy satellites, to that and found the secluded building in northeastern Syria which Israel’s air force eventually destroyed.

You write that Israel somehow managed to get photos of the inside of that building. How?

A Mossad team in Europe obtained them from the computer files of a Syrian official who was traveling.

What I think is so interesting is that Israel decided never to confirm the air raid that destroyed the reactor, hoping that, as a result, no war would break out. It didn’t want to humiliate Assad. It was a clever strategy, and it suggests that if Israel takes action inside Iran, it similarly won’t confirm it.

Israel has already started taking action on Iran as you document in your book.

Yes, and Yossi and I believe we are the first to establish that the assassinations of five nuclear scientists in Tehran from 2007 to 2011 were committed by members of a special Mossad squad called Kidon. We looked into the possibility that Israel hired mercenaries or local Iranian dissidents. But our sources told us that if an operation is extremely sensitive, they don’t trust others to do it.

What is the Kidon unit?

It’s an extremely well trained and talented group that can get to places that are almost unthinkable. In other words, they are super spies. Even within the Mossad, most staff members don’t know the real names of Kidon operatives.

How many Kidon operatives are there?

My impression is that there are just a few dozen. They’re handpicked for being especially talented, including skills at foreign languages. They’re trained in the use of all kinds of weapons and most of the assassination missions have been done by them.

Do you think assassinating Iranian scientists and planting sophisticated computer viruses can continue to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program? Or are we nearing the point where only an air attack would do the trick?

I think it’s possible to keep causing delays and problems. Recently retired Israeli intelligence people speak of a list of actions which still have not been done – including cutting off electricity and water, causing communications difficulties, planting more computer viruses, etc. They think a lot of sabotage can still be done, and that is one of their arguments against sending Israel’s air force to attack Iran.

Tons of people have heard of Israel’s legendary spy, Eli Cohen, who was caught and hanged in Syria in 1965. Does the Mossad still have undercover agents like Eli Cohen living in Arab countries?

The Muslim Brotherhood, the movement to which newly-elected Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi belongs, released a statement on Monday claiming the Sinai border attack that left 16 Egyptian security officers dead “could be attributed to the Mossad,” according to Egyptian daily Al-Masry Al-Youm.

The Muslim Brotherhood found proof for the ‘Mossad-as-perpetrator theory’ in the fact that Israel “had several days ago instructed Israeli citizens who were in Sinai to leave immediately.” The Islamic movement also said that the incident “attempts to claim the failure of the new Egyptian government that was formed only three days ago” and is “also an attempt to disrupt the president’s reform project and drive a wedge between the Egyptian administration and its people, and the Palestinian government and the people of Gaza.”

Israel indeed renewed its travel advisory against traveling to the Sinai last Thursday. “The information we have indicates that terrorist organizations in the Gaza Strip, as well as other groups, are continuing to attempt terror attacks… against Israeli tourists staying in the Sinai in the imminent future,” the National Security Council’s counterterrorism bureau stated at the time. Even after publicizing the travel advisory, Israel received more specific intelligence information of a terror threat emanating from the Sinai, which according to Israeli media was passed on to Egyptian authorities. The Egyptians “made light” of the warning, while Israel’s vigilance allowed its security forces to foil a deadly terrorist attack within Israel.

Abdallah Gohama, the the top tribal chief in Central Sinai, confirmed that the Egyptian authorities were on notice of impending terrorist threats prior to the attack on Sunday night. “Sinai chiefs warned against the precarious security situation in Sinai months ago after extremist groups spread there, and they told authorities that the situation is critical,” he said in an interview with Al-Sharq Al-Awsat. Gohama added that Morsi’s decision to open Sinai-Palestinian border crossings and ease security measures facilitated the proliferation of such groups in the Sinai and Gaza.

In related news, protesters from across the Egyptian political spectrum marched to the residence of the Israeli ambassador in Cairo on Tuesday, chanting anti-Israel slogans and demanding his expulsion.

A Hamas leader was assassinated in Damascus on Wednesday night, a member of the party’s politburo announced, according to the Palestinian Ma’an news agency..

Izzat al-Rishq wrote on his Facebook page that Kamal Ghanaja, also known as Nizar Abu Mujahed, was killed in his home in the Syrian capital.

Hamas is investigating the crime, al-Rishq said, adding that the “cowardly” murder would not go unpunished.

A Hamas source in Gaza said “there were marks of torture” on Ghanaja’s body.

A Hamas official in Lebanon told Agence-France Presse that the group suspected Israel’s Mossad of killing Ghanaja.

Ghanaja had worked as an aide to Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a senior Hamas leader who was shot dead in a hotel room in Dubai

According to Ma’an, Israel’s Mossad intelligence service was widely believed to have been behind the assassination of al-Mabhouh. Israel never confirmed or denied the allegation.

Asked about reports of Ghanaja’s death, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak told Israeli Army Radio: “He was not really personally familiar (to me). According to all the background published, he was no saint and I don’t want to add anything or comment about this incident.”

Several websites affiliated with the opposition to President Bashar Assad blamed the Syrian regime for Ghanaja’s killing and said Assad’s forces murdered the Hamas leader as a message to the movement not to reject its long-time Syrian ally.

Hamas’ politburo moved to Damascus in 1999 after it was expelled from Jordan, but the party quietly quit the Syrian capital amid the bloody revolt against Assad. In February, Hamas leaders publicly denounced Assad and declared their support for the Syrian rebels.