Lebanon has blamed Israel for destroying thousands of pagers, causing them to explode, killing several people and wounding thousands more, in an apparent attempt to weaken the Islamist militant group Hezbollah. Israel has neither confirmed nor denied the attack, which followed nearly a year of cross-border rocket fire between the two sides in the second front of the war in Gaza.
United Nations, government and technology industry officials are at odds over how the series of coordinated blasts were carried out, although senior officials from Israel’s intelligence agencies, Mossad and Shin Bet, have given accounts of past assassinations – some of which required a high level of technical or operational prowess.
Fatal phone call
The Shin Bet used a mobile phone secretly equipped with explosives to assassinate Yahya Ayyash, a Hamas master bombmaker nicknamed “the Engineer,” in Gaza in 1996. A Palestinian middleman had given Ayyash the phone to receive a call from his father. When Israeli intelligence officers confirmed that it was Ayyash’s voice on the line, the phone was remotely detonated, causing fatal head injuries.
Neck poison
In retaliation for a series of suicide bombings by Hamas in 1997, then-first-term Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the assassination of the Palestinian Islamist group’s politburo chief Khaled Mashaal in the Jordanian capital, Amman.
Two undercover Mossad officers sprayed poison on Meshaal’s neck as he got out of his car for an appointment, one of them opening a previously shaken can of Coca-Cola so that he could give an innocent explanation for the liquid. The plan failed because Meshaal’s daughter ran after him, causing a colleague to look back and see the would-be assassins.
They were detained by Jordanian police, and were repatriated only after Israel provided medication to save Meshaal’s life.
Fake tourists
Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, an international arms supplier to Hamas, was found dead in his Dubai hotel room in 2010. UAE authorities initially ruled it a death of natural causes, but the case was reopened after a Gaza-based Palestinian group accused Israel of murdering him.
Subsequent investigations revealed CCTV footage showing Mossad men using cloned European passports and posing as tourists playing tennis, businessmen or hotel staff were tracking Mabhouh and gathering in his hotel room. An autopsy revealed that Mabhouh had been knocked unconscious and strangled.
Traffic explosion
Between 2010 and 2020, about half a dozen Iranian nuclear scientists were killed or injured in gun attacks or explosions that officials blamed on Israel. Most of them were caused by magnetic bombs that motorcyclists strapped to vehicles, according to Iranian state media reports.
Israel has not confirmed it was behind any of the attacks, though its officials have acknowledged being embroiled in a shadow war with Iran. A former Israeli prime minister, Naftali Bennett, later claimed responsibility for a similar killing in the Iranian capital in 2022.
Satellite Sniper
Iran’s chief nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was shot dead in 2020 while driving in a convoy on the outskirts of Tehran. Some Iranian media reports said Israel used a satellite-controlled sniper rifle mounted on the back of a pick-up truck and equipped with AI face recognition. Israel did not confirm the killing, although Netanyahu previously identified Fakhrizadeh as the head of a secret Iranian nuclear weapons program, saying: “Remember his name.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)