In December 2020, Canadian research laboratory Citizen Lab found that the phones of 35 Al Jazeera staffers and two prominent journalists covering the Middle East had been infected with Pegasus. The laboratory attributed some of these attacks to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
In July 2021, the Pegasus Project revealed that two phone numbers belonging to the Qatari president of Paris Saint-Germain football club and chairman of beIN Media Group, Nasser Al-Khelaifi, were selected for potential surveillance by clients of NSO Group in 2018, at a time when Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia were engaged in a diplomatic and commercial stand-off.