Hezbollah pagers explode: Has Israel carried out such attacks before?

Israel and its spy agency Mossad are accused of orchestrating the explosion of thousands of pagers that killed and maimed civilians and Hezbollah operatives across Lebanon on Tuesday.

They are also suspected of being behind a series of explosions of other devices in various Lebanese areas on Wednesday.

The exploding radio communication devices, to which Hezbollah switched to avoid mobile phone hacking, killed nine people including an eight-year-old girl, and injured close to 3,000, including Iranian ambassador to Lebanon Mojtaba Amani.

Mossad and the Israeli army cooperated to plant explosives in the devices, according to Israeli and Western media outlets. Israeli authorities remain silent, news circulating that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu instructed everyone not to speak.

The explosions exposed many Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon and, as they filled the hospitals, Israeli operatives had opportunities to gather intelligence.

The method and scale of the attack – which Hezbollah ally Iran branded “mass murder” – are unprecedented but Israel has been carrying out assassinations and sabotage operations for decades.

Here are some of them:

Innovations, assassinations

Despite condemnation and escalating regional tensions, Israel has assassinated opponents in ways that may seem far-fetched even in some films.

On July 31, Hamas politburo chief Ismail Haniyeh and top Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr were assassinated within hours of each other in Tehran and Beirut respectively, delaying prospects of a Gaza ceasefire again.

Shukr, a member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), two children and a woman were killed in an air strike that hit a densely populated area in Beirut’s suburbs.

Haniyeh and his bodyguard were killed in a residence for dignitaries in Iran’s capital Tehran.

The exact weapon and range have not been officially confirmed, but the projectile that killed Haniyeh was likely a compact, guided anti-fortification missile fired from only kilometres away, avoiding air defences.

However, unnamed Israeli sources claimed in media interviews that a bomb was planted in the room in advance.

Some in Hamas suggested Haniyeh’s use of WhatsApp or an insecure SIM card may have led Mossad operatives to his exact location.

In November 2020, Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was driving with his wife and bodyguards near Tehran when he was assassinated by a satellite-guided machinegun in broad daylight.

Blood stains on the ground at the site of the attack that killed Iranian scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh outside Tehran on November 27, 2020 [WANA (West Asia News Agency) via Reuters]

A one-tonne machinegun was smuggled into Iran in pieces by Mossad and set up on the back of a pick-up truck parked on the side of the road, according to reports by Israeli and Western media.

Iranian authorities said the gun had smart targeting technologies, only killing Fakhrizadeh in the backseat of the car, leaving his wife sitting next to him uninjured.

The truck exploded to destroy evidence after Fakhrizadeh was dead.

In the decade before Fakhrizadeh’s assassination, at least five other nuclear scientists were murdered to try to hobble the Iranian nuclear programme, some by sticky bombs put on their moving cars by masked agents on motorcycles.

Iran has also blamed Israel for multiple major sabotage attacks against its nuclear facilities, most notably the underground Natanz installations in Isfahan.

Israel and the United States were behind the infamous Stuxnet virus that corrupted systems and destroyed centrifuges, dealing a blow to the Iranian nuclear programme in 2010.

Israel has carried out cyberoperations inside Iran as well, including a cyberattack that disrupted services at most fuel stations across the country in December 2023.

Banks, ports, railway systems, airports and other civilian infrastructure have also been hit over the years.

In a rare move in 2018, Israel claimed to have stolen a trove of documents about the Iranian nuclear programme in the early 2000s.

Netanyahu presented the alleged findings on national television.

Targeted killings in Lebanon, Syria

Israel has been eliminating opponents in the two neighbouring countries for decades, claiming to target Iranian interests, taking advantage of its air superiority to launch many such operations, using fighter jets and armed drones.

Many senior Iranian, Palestinian and Lebanese military and political figures have been killed since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza, including senior Hamas official Saleh al-Arouri in a strike on the Beirut suburb of Dahiyeh in early January 2024.

The most high-profile attack on Syria since the start of the war on Gaza came at the beginning of April this year, when Israeli missiles destroyed a consular building of the Iranian mission to Damascus, killing 16 people, including two top IRGC generals.

Iran launched more than 300 missiles and drones at Israel in retaliation and Israel responded by launching multiple quadcopters – from inside Iran – at a military base in central Isfahan, damaging the radar system of a missile defence battery.

Israel gathers intelligence for operations through satellite and aerial surveillance, as well as a network of Israeli and local operatives in many countries. They are also allegedly assisted by intelligence from Western allies, particularly the US.

Using Pegasus spyware, Israel for years extracted secret information from people, government officials, journalists and companies, among others.

A long history of attacks

Assassinations have been part of the Israeli playbook as far back as the British-backed Zionist movement before Israel was founded by ethnically cleansing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1948.

In July 1956, Israel killed Egyptian army Lieutenant-Colonel Mustafa Hafez, who recruited forcibly displaced Palestinians to carry out attacks in Israel, with a parcel bomb.

Israel assassinated many people in the 20 years after the 1972 Munich Olympics – when 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team were killed by the Palestinian Black September group – in Italy, France, Cyprus, Greece and Lebanon among other places.

Ali Hassan Salameh, who the Israelis believed was behind the Munich killings, was killed in Lebanon in January 1979, when a radio signal detonated a bomb in his vehicle.

The Israeli operatives were soon released in what became known as the “Lillehammer Affair”.

Wadi Haddad, leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, is believed to have been poisoned by laced Belgian chocolates in East Germany in 1978.

Fathi Shaqaqi, co-founder and leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, was shot in front of a hotel in Malta in 1995.

A year later, chief Hamas bombmaker Yahya Ayyash was killed by explosives planted by Israel in a mobile phone.

A Palestinian boy holds up posters of Ayyash at a memorial for the Hamas bombmaker, known as The Engineer [Reuters]

Failures

Israel has failed sometimes.

During one of the failed attempts to kill Salameh, six of 15 Mossad operatives were convicted by Norwegian authorities for complicity in gunning down a Moroccan waiter they mistook for Salameh.

In 1997, then-Hamas politburo chief Khaled Meshaal was sprayed with poison by Israeli agents posing as Canadian tourists, who were arrested.

Jordan threatened to sever its security agreements with Israel, forcing Netanyahu to courier over the antidote that saved Meshaal’s life.

In exchange for the agents’ release and to resolve the crisis, Israel agreed to release spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, co-founder of Hamas.

In 2004, a wheelchair-bound Yassin was assassinated by missiles fired from an Israeli helicopter that also killed civilians leaving morning prayers at a mosque in the northern Gaza Strip.