Exploding phone, toxic spray: A timeline of covert Israeli hits

By Dan Williams

Lebanon has blamed Israel for the sabotage of thousands of pagers that caused them to explode, killing several people and wounding thousands, in an apparent bid to weaken the Islamist militant group Hezbollah.

Israel has neither confirmed nor denied responsibility for the attack, which came after almost a year of cross-border rocket fire between the two sides in a second front to the war in Gaza.

United Nations, government and tech-industry officials were left scratching their heads over how the co-ordinated series of blasts had been carried out, though veterans of Israel’s intelligence agencies Mossad and Shin Bet have opened up about assassinations in the past — some of which required high levels of technical or operational ingenuity.

Deadly Phone Call

Shin Bet used a mobile phone secretly fitted with explosives to kill Yahya Ayyash, a master bombmaker from Hamas nicknamed “the Engineer,” in Gaza in 1996. A Palestinian go-between gave Ayyash the phone to receive a call from his father. When Israeli eavesdroppers verified it was Ayyash’s voice on the line, the phone was remotely detonated, causing a lethal head injury.

Neck Poison

In retaliation for a series of Hamas suicide bombings in 1997, then first-term Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the killing of the Palestinian Islamist group’s politburo chief, Khaled Mashaal, in the Jordanian capital of Amman.

Two undercover Mossad officers sprayed poison onto Meshaal’s nape as he left his car for an appointment, with one of them opening a pre-shaken can of Coca-Cola to provide an innocent explanation for the rogue liquid. The plan failed because Meshaal’s daughter ran after him, prompting an aide to turn around and notice the would-be assassins.

They were captured by Jordanian police, and repatriated only after Israel provided an antidote to save Meshaal’s life.

Fake Tourists

Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, an international arms procurer for Hamas, was found dead in his Dubai hotel room in 2010. Emirati authorities initially deemed it death by natural causes, but re-opened the case after the Gaza-based Palestinian group accused Israel of killing him.

The subsequent investigation uncovered CCTV footage of a Mossad hit team, using cloned European passports and posing as tennis-playing tourists, businesspeople or hotel staff, surveilling Mabhouh and converging on his hotel room. An autopsy determined that Mabhouh had been sedated and smothered.

Traffic Blasts

Between 2010 and 2020, about half-a-dozen Iranian nuclear scientists were killed or wounded in gun attacks or explosions that authorities blamed on Israel. Most of them were caused by magnetized bombs that had been attached to vehicles by passing motorcyclists, according to Iranian state media reports.

Israel hasn’t confirmed it was behind any of the strikes, though its officials acknowledged being locked in a shadow war with Iran. A former Israeli prime minister, Naftali Bennett, would later claim responsibility for a similar assassination in the Iranian capital in 2022.

Satellite Sniper

Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, Iran’s chief nuclear scientist, was shot dead while driving in a convoy on the outskirts of Tehran in 2020. 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 didn’t confirm the killing, though Netanyahu had previously identified Fakhrizadeh as head of a secret Iranian nuclear weapons program, saying: “Remember his name.”