Israel's assassinations via telecoms predate pagers

From letter bombs to car bombs to even chocolate, Israel has a long, sordid history of assassinations and unorthodox ways to carry them out

Lina Jaradat

Using phones to kill or strike down traditional enemies is not new to Israel. It actually pre-dates both pagers and mobiles.

Israel's assassinations via telecoms predate pagers

Sami Moubayed

last update on 18 Sep 2024

From direct military strikes that took down prominent Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmad Yassin and his successor Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi in 2004 to close-range shootings that killed three top Palestinian commanders in Beirut in 1973, followed by Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad) in Tunis in 1988, Israel has a long, sordid history of assassinations and unorthodox ways to carry them out.

At one point, Israel sent letter bombs to its enemies, like the 1972 one that nearly killed Yasser Arafat’s confident Bassam Abu Sharif. It also used car bombs like the 1979 killing of Arafat’s security chief Ali Hasan Salameh in Beirut. But it was poisoned chocolate which took the life of Wadie Haddad of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in 1978.

Yesterday, yet another method was introduced: death by pager, carried out on a mass scale in Lebanon, targeting thousands of Hezbollah members and killing 12 people.

Nothing new

Using phones and telecom to kill or strike down traditional enemies is not new to Israel. It actually pre-dates both pagers and mobiles, dating back to the 1978 assassination of Mahmoud Hamshari, representative of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) in France. Accused of involvement in the September 1972 attack on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, he was tracked down to his Paris residence that December and tricked into leaving it by a Mossad agent dubbed as an Italian journalist seeking an interview with Hamshari.

Using phones to kill or strike down traditional enemies is not new to Israel. It actually pre-dates both pagers and mobiles.

A special unit sneaked into the house and planted an explosive in Hamshari's office desk. He got a call, and the minute he picked up the phone, the explosive went off on 8 December 1972, and he died a month later in January 1973.

Many years later, Israel did it again with Yahya Ayyash, the lead bomb-maker in Hamas and commander of its military operations in the occupied West Bank. An associate of its military commander, Mohammed Deif (who Israel killed earlier this year), he was responsible for many operations during the first Palestinian intifada of 1987. Israel planted a chip into a mobile phone, which was given to him by a trusted associate, who was seemingly unaware that it was rigged by Mossad. Ayyash was killed on 5 January 1996 and Hamas named one of its missiles in his honour: Ayyash 250.

Then came the assassination of a less-known figure, Samih Malabi, commander of the Fatah Movement in the Qalandia Camp north of Jerusalem. He was assassinated via a chip planted into his cell phone on 17 December 2000, exactly like Yahya Ayyash. A few months later, another Fatah commander, Usama al-Jawabra was assassinated by explosive in a phone booth in Nablus, followed by Izz El-Deen Sheikh Khalil, a Hamas commander who answered a phone call while driving his SUV in Damascus, which triggered an explosive that claimed his life on 27 September 2004.

More recently, the exact same method was used to kill Fuad Shukr, a top commander in Lebanon's Hezbollah, who got a phone call that killed him on 31 July 2024. Many speculated that Israel had managed to penetrate Lebanon's telecommunications network to kill Shukr, which Hezbollah denied.

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