The simultaneous detonations of thousands of Hezbollah bombers in Lebanon are an unprecedented attack, not only because of their scale, but also because they targeted an organization that prided itself on its security systems and believed its communications were completely protected. However, this is not the first time that communications devices have been turned into killing machines.
Although Israel has avoided any public comment on the attack and is never expected to officially claim responsibility, international media attribute the entire planning and execution to the Mossad, with the cooperation of the 8200 cyber warfare group. Israeli spies have decades of experience and a long history of using phones – and their technological successors – to track and assassinate their enemies.
Revenge for the PLO strike at the 1972 Olympics
Our first attack of this type dates back to 1972 and occurred in retaliation for the PLO’s murder of 11 Israeli athletes during the Munich Olympic Games.
Mossad agents broke into the Paris apartment of PLO representative Mahmoud Hamsari and moved the marble base of his telephone. On December 8 of that year, when he answered the phone, the replicas of the explosives on the base were detonated. Hamsari was seriously injured and eventually succumbed to his injuries.
A cell phone in Gaza
In 1996, the Shin Bet, the national intelligence service, managed to trick Yahya Ayyas, a Hamas bomber responsible for the deaths of dozens of Israelis, into accepting a call on a Motorola Alpha mobile phone that had been smuggled into Gaza by a Palestinian accomplice.
50 grams of explosives were planted inside the cell phone – enough to kill anyone who held the phone to their ear.
For the past two decades, Mossad’s main focus has been Iran—specifically, its shadowy nuclear and missile programs. In 2004, the Israeli government ordered Mossad to “prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons,” the New York Times reported. In the years since, the agency has conducted “a campaign of sabotage and cyberattacks” on Iran’s nuclear facilities and continued to “methodically pick the experts” who lead the weapons program. Agents have killed “five nuclear scientists and wounded another.”
And a killer robot
The climax came in 2020, when Iran’s top nuclear weapons scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, was shot by a remote-controlled machine gun. Iran blamed Israel, but Tehran’s “far-fetched” explanation for what happened — a “killer robot” — was met with derision. It was a “spontaneous science fiction story,” the NYT reported. But this time, “there really was a killer robot.”
Even the “futuristic” assassination of Fakhrizadeh, of course, required human hands to get the weapon into the country and put it in place.
