Mossad's history with explosive technology

Israel's intelligence agency Mossad is reportedly behind the operation that caused thousands of Hezbollah's pagers to detonate across Lebanon. 

Israel has not claimed responsibility for the "unprecedented" security breach among Lebanon's armed militant group. It killed at least 12 people and injured more than 3,000, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry – "including many of the group's fighters and Iran's envoy to Beirut". But two senior sources told Reuters that it was the work of Mossad.

Hezbollah, the powerful Iranian-backed group, has vowed revenge against Iran's long-time foe Israel, whom it holds "fully responsible" for the pager attacks. American and other officials briefed on the operation have also pointed the finger at Israel, said The New York Times. After nearly a year of escalating tit-for-tat strikes between Israel and Hezbollah, "most people" in Lebanon assume that the exploding pagers are Mossad's work, said The Times. If so, it would "simply be the most striking example yet" of the intelligence agency's methods.

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How far back does this go?

Mossad has a "decades-long" history of using telephones and explosives to track and assassinate targets abroad, said the Financial Times.

But the practice exploded into the world's consciousness in 1972, after the Palestinian group Black September took 11 Israeli athletes hostage during the Olympics in Munich. All the hostages were killed – nine died in a botched rescue attempt, along with five of the eight terrorists – in what became known as the Munich massacre. 

In revenge, Israel launched Operation Wrath of God, a covert years-long campaign of car bombs and booby-tracked packages to kill members of the militant group and of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Most famously, Mossad operatives "swapped out the marble base" of the phone used by Mahmoud Hamshari, the PLO representative in Paris, for a replica "packed" with explosives. When he answered the phone, "a nearby Israeli team remotely detonated the explosives", killing Hamshari. The operation became "part of Israeli spy legend".

Have there been other notable operations?

Too many to count, said Foreign Policy. But Mossad's early rudimentary operations quickly developed into more sophisticated methods combined with advanced surveillance and cyber capabilities.

In 1979, the assassination of PLO leader Ali Hassan Salameh with a car bomb in Beirut showcased the group's growing confidence with explosives.

Most prominently, in 1996 Israel's internal security agency managed to trick Hamas's chief bomb maker into answering a phone call from his father. The phone had been brought into Gaza by a collaborator, and Yahya Ayyash was killed when the hidden explosives were detonated. The "sophisticated" assassination of a man known as "the Engineer" "deprived Hamas of a key and uniquely talented asset".

What about the Iranian scientists?

In the past two decades, Mossad's primary focus has been Iran – in particular, its shadowy nuclear and missile programmes. 

In 2004, Israel's government ordered Mossad to "prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons", said The New York Times. Over the next few years, the agency carried out "a campaign of sabotage and cyberattacks" on Iran's nuclear facilities, and continued "methodically picking off the experts" leading the weapons programme. Its agents assassinated "five nuclear scientists and wounded another". 

The notorious culmination came in 2020, when Iran's chief nuclear weapons scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was shot dead by a remotely controlled machine gun. Iran blamed Israel, but Tehran's "far-fetched" explanation for what happened – a "killer robot" – was "widely mocked" and assumed to be a cover-up for its own failures.

It was a "straight-out-of-science-fiction story", said the NYT. But this time, "there really was a killer robot".

How does the pager operation differ?

Even the "futuristic" assassination of Fakhrizadeh required "human hands on the ground" to get the gun into the country and into position, said The Times.

We don't yet know why the pagers exploded – whether packed with explosive substances or altered in some way – but the execution must have been more "hands off" to remotely detonate up to a thousand devices at the same time.

The 1996 assassination of Ayyash, one of Israel's "more celebrated operations", still relied on an informant to plant the booby-trapped device, said The Spectator. "The complexity, scale and scope of the pager-bombs make the Ayyash hit look like child's play."

The militant group had only turned to pagers to avoid Israeli surveillance of smartphones. But in the same way that "killing Ayyash didn't stop Hamas", the "pager bombs won't stop Hezbollah", said the magazine.