French authorities opened an investigation after a lawyer for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said there was a contract on his head for defending the Israeli leader, the Paris prosecutor’s office said on Monday.

Olivier Pardo told investigators a former convict, Rudy Terranova, told him on July 16 that he had been approached to carry out a hit on the lawyer, a source close to the case said, confirming a report in the newspaper Le Parisien.

Terranova said he was approached to carry out the job while on a trip to Senegal by members of Lebanon’s Hezbollah, a key ally of Israel’s arch-foe Iran.

He said the terrorists targeted Pardo because of his work for Netanyahu, who has been the subject of an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court (ICC) since November 2024, accused of crimes against humanity and war crimes over Israel’s ongoing war against Hamas in Gaza.

Pardo told AFP he was “calm, it’s one of the risks of my job when you defend causes which have sparked debate in France.”

“I am confident that the judiciary will determine whether this is a real or a phantom menace,” said the lawyer, who counts prominent French politicians including the far-right figure Eric Zemmour among his other clients.

According to Le Parisien, Terranova was taken into custody in the week beginning on July 21 in connection with the case, though AFP was not able to confirm this.

A former gang member, Terranova was convicted in 2004 of violence considered to be motivated by Islamist radicalism.

He served as a police informant and was later suspected of being behind an attempt in 2007 to murder another lawyer, Karim Achoui. He was acquitted of that charge.