Israeli PM: US spying 'unacceptable'

JERUSALEM - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday that it is "unacceptable" that United States' intelligence agency is spying on Israeli officials, local media reported.

In a weekly meeting of Knesset (parliament) members of Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party, the Prime Minister said he had asked to call forth an inquiry into the details of the supposed eavesdropping.

"In the close relationship between Israel and the US there are things that must not be done and that are unacceptable for us," the Ynet news website cited Netanyahu as saying.

Netanyahu also mentioned in that aspect Jonathan Pollard, a US-Israeli spy who has been incarcerated for spying against the US on Israel's behalf and sentenced to life in prison in 1987 for espionage, a sensitive topic in the alliance between Israel and the US and the conduct of espionage between the allies.

"He should have been released a long time ago," Netanyahu said. "This is understood to everyone here and I believe it is understood to growing audience in the US as well," the prime minister added.

Documents were leaked over the weekend by the former US National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden and published in Der Spiegel and the New York Times.

These documents showed that the NSA, along with British Intelligence, intercepted emails and phone calls of Netanyahu, former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and former Defense Minister Ehud Barak.