Hezbollah pager blasts the latest ‘sophisticated’ attack allegedly carried out by Israeli spy agency Mossad

Israel is accused of triggering thousands of pagers to explode at the same time across Lebanon in a targeted attack against members of Hezbollah.

At least nine people are dead, including a young girl, with 200 more in critical condition and more than 2800 others injured by the sabotaged devices.

Hezbollah has accused Israel of orchestrating the attack.

Unnamed officials have accused the Israeli spy agency Mossad of tampering with the pagers, which Hezbollah had ordered from Golden Apollo in Taiwan before they landed in Lebanon for use by its fighters.

Officials, including some from the US, said the devices were laced with military-grade explosive material, as little as 1 to 2 ounces next to the battery, and a remote-controlled switch, the New York Times reports.

But at 3.30pm in Lebanon on Monday, local time, the pagers received a message purportedly from Hezbollah leadership. This message activated the detonation sequence. Officials told the New York Times the devices were programmed to beep for several seconds before exploding.

Hezbollah banned cell phones from the battlefield and turned to pagers months ago out of concern phones could be hacked and be used by rivals, particularly Israel, to track and monitor fighters, Reuters reports.

Although the militant group put the blame squarely on Israel’s shoulders, the Jewish state has not commented on the attack nor said it was behind it.

However, it seems exploding pagers could be the latest in Mossad’s decades-long history of actions against Hezbollah and other opponents of Israel.

Kidnapping the ‘architect of the Holocaust’

Mossad has been conducting foreign intelligence operations around the world since the early 50s and maintains numerous secret agents in Middle East nations abroad. Its agents report directly to the Prime Minister of Israel.

Among its most famous operations include the 1960 capture of the “architect of the Holocaust” Adolf Eichmann to stand trial for war crimes.

Mossad agents tracked down and kidnapped the former Nazi in Argentina, where they held him in a safe house until they could smuggle him from the country. To fool local authorities, the spies reportedly dressed Eichmann in an Israeli flight crew uniform.

Once in Israel, Eichmann was tried and sentenced to death.

Eli Cohen: The impossible Mossad spy

Among its famous operatives include Eli Cohen, an Egyptian-born Jew who infiltrated the highest ranks of the Syrian government by posing as a Syrian businessman.

Between 1961 and 1965 Cohen relayed Syrian secrets from inside Damascus to the Israeli government; secrets that would help Israel win the Six-Day War.

In January 1965, Syrian counterintelligence identified Cohen’s radio signal and arrested him. He was interrogated, convicted in a military trial and publicly executed in May 1965.

His unbelievable story has since been retold for film, in The Impossible Spy, and in Netflix’s series The Spy, starring Sacha Baron Cohen.

Operation Wrath of God in response to Munich massacre

At 4.30am on September 5, 1972, a week into the Munich Olympic Games, eight people affiliated with the Palestinian militant group Black September broke into the Olympic Village and took nine Israeli athletes hostage and killed two others.

More than 20 hours later, after fraught back-and-forth negotiations with officials, a foiled rescue mission by German polics, and a shoot-out on airport tarmac, the terrorists eventually killed the remaining hostages.

Israel’s then-Prime Minister Golda Meir and the Israeli Defense Committee secretly authorised Mossad to track down and kill those allegedly responsible for the massacre.

For the next year, a wave of assassination attempts on suspected Black September and Palestine Liberation Organisation operatives allegedly involved in the Munich massacre began across Europe. The mission was later known as Operation Wrath of God and inspired the 2005 Steven Spielberg film Munich.

In one such execution, Wrath of God operatives planted an explosive device in the telephone in the Paris apartment of Mahmoud Hamshari, the alleged coordinator of the massacre. A spy, posing as a journalist, scheduled a phone call with Hamshari on December 1972 and when he identified himself, the bomb detonated.

On July 21, 1973, the squad mistakenly killed Ahmed Bouchiki, an innocent Moroccan man in Lillehammer, Norway. They reportedly thought he was Black September operations chief Ali Hassan Salameh (he was later killed in a car bombing in 1979).

Norwegian authorities arrested and convicted five Mossad agents, and their investigation unravelled the agency’s European network It also prompted Prime Minister Meir to suspend the Wrath of God program.

Assassinating numerous Hezbollah and Hamas operatives

Mossad agents have also purportedly tracked down and assassinated several notable figures tied to Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, and Palestine and Hamas.

In 2010, The United Arab Emirates and Hamas accused Mossad agents of killing Hamas’ senior military commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in a Dubai hotel room. Al-Mabhouh was allegedly injected with deadly poison by operatives who waited in his room.

According to CCTV and other evidence, at least 26 agents travelled on bogus passports — including Australian, British, Irish and French, and one real German passport — for the operation that took just 19 hours to execute.

No direct evidence has ever been found linking Mossad to the crime.

Teaming up with the CIA to target Iran’s nuclear weapon program

Mossad is believed to have partnered with the CIA to create a powerful computer worm to target Iran’s nuclear weapons program in 2010.

The Stuxnet worm was built to destroy centrifuges used to enrich uranium by sending them speeding out of control.

It was introduced to the Iranian cumputer network on a flash memory drive and spread from computer to computer until it found its target.

Using AI to gun down Iran’s ‘father’ of nuclear program

Iran’s top nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was assassinated in November 2020 by an AI-enhanced robotic machine gun powered from thousands of kilometres away.

Mossad handled the whole operation from a command centre outside the country, according to the New York Times, based on interviews with American, Israeli and Iranian officials.

It took less than a minute to gun down Fakhrizadeh, considered the “father” of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, with a machine that was smuggled into Iran in parts and assembled in an abandoned looking car. The vehicle was primed to blow up after the hit.