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Revealed: How Mossad kills its enemies - from paralysing injections and electrocution to poison toothpaste and AI machine guns, DAVID PATRIKARAKOS reveals the secrets of the world's deadliest assassins
Hamas's leaders are 'walking dead', promised Israel's defence minister Yoav Gallant after the October 7 atrocities: 'They are living on borrowed time.' The Israelis are making good on their word.
Eleven days ago, the lethal efficiency of Israel's targeted assassinations was once more demonstrated to the world when the political head of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, was blown up in a guesthouse in Tehran. The Israelis have not claimed responsibility, and nor have they denied it. But everyone knows it was them.
It was an extraordinary coup: the killing of one of Israel's foremost adversaries in the very heart of enemy territory. And this is the real kicker – it was on the day of the new Iranian president's inauguration. A tactical triumph for Israel. Rank humiliation for Iran.
Details of the assassination remain murky. Initial reports suggested the Israelis killed Haniyeh with a remotely detonated bomb that was smuggled into the house he was staying in, probably around two months earlier, though sources now tell me the hit more likely came from a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher of some description.
What makes this so extraordinary is that the guesthouse is run by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Indeed, it forms part of a wider IRGC compound known as Neshat in a well-off Tehran neighbourhood.
Yahya Sinwar - the newly appointed and more hardline leader of Hamas - is hiding in Gaza. Israel has vowed to find and kill him
Fuad Shukr, a commander in the Iranian proxy group Hezbollah, and military adviser to its leader Hassan Nasrallah, was eliminated in a precision strike in Beirut
The hit was so precise that the leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group, who was staying next door, survived with his room largely intact.
The operation reportedly took months of surveillance – with extensive analysis of Haniyeh's previous visits to the compound used to ascertain which room he would most likely be staying in. No Israeli could have got near that facility. Mossad, Israel's foreign security service, did what it has done so often: used locals.
In Iran, these range from members of Iranian dissident groups such as the Mujahedeen-e Khalq to those they can bribe or blackmail inside the government and even the IRGC. Indeed, sources inside Israel are reporting that it was IRGC members who were involved this time, though it has not been independently verified.
And Haniyeh wasn't the only terrorist taken out that day. Fuad Shukr, a commander in the Iranian proxy group Hezbollah, and military adviser to its leader Hassan Nasrallah, was also eliminated in a precision strike in Beirut.
Critical to Hezbollah's evolution into the large and effective fighting force it is today, Shukr was also supposedly the architect of the 1983 Beirut bombing of an American barracks that killed almost 250 marines.
The hits followed the killing of Mohammed Deif – a man who helped plan the October 7 atrocities and whom Gallant described as the 'Osama Bin Laden of Gaza' – in an air strike in Khan Younis city in Gaza last month.
Deif was the leader of Hamas's military wing and had already survived seven assassination attempts, including one in 2022, which the Israelis say cost him an eye, foot and hand.
The IDF struck the building he was in with a 2,000lb bomb. Hamas denies his death, but the Israelis have released footage of the ruined building. When the news of the assassinations engulfed my feeds and illuminated my phone last Wednesday, I was reminded of the scene in The Godfather where Michael Corleone stands in church uttering his vows as godfather to his infant nephew as the action cuts to his various associates conducting a series of near-simultaneous hits on all his enemies.
To strike your enemies in their own country, often in their own homes, is extraordinary – strategically, tactically and symbolically. How does Israel do it? With a clear process, near pathological attention to detail, regional expertise and networks in countries across the world.
Mohammed Deif - leader of Hamas's military wing and a man who helped plan the October 7 atrocities - was killed in an air strike in Khan Younis city in Gaza last month
The political head of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, was blown up in a guesthouse in Tehran
Inside Mossad sits its Caesarea branch. Named after the ancient port city built by King Herod the Great, Caesarea is the division tasked with special, covert operations. Within that sits the Kidon ('Bayonet') unit, responsible for carrying out assassinations. The assassins are often multilingual, dual nationals and specialise in operating abroad. The process begins with identifying the target and collecting information on them. Here, the unit relies on its network of spies and local partners across the target location.
In the case of Hamas, Mossad has longstanding – and expansive – networks of informers across Gaza and the West Bank.
It also tracks Hamas and Hezbollah communications, especially between Gaza, Istanbul and Beirut, to identify the movements of prominent figures.
Once they have been identified, target dossiers are then taken to the Intelligence Services Committee, which comprises the chiefs of Israeli intelligence organisations and is known by its Hebrew acronym, VARASH, or Vaadan Rashei Ha-sherutim. A Mossad kill order is known as a 'red page' order, and each one is jointly authorised by the prime minister and other ministers, including usually the defence minister.
And then the killing starts.
Israelis are nothing if not creative and they apply this creativity to their hits. A few years back I covered a spate of assassinations of Iranian scientists working on the country's nuclear programme. Israel has long vowed that it will never allow Iran to get a nuclear bomb, and it is doing everything it can to make good on its word.
Among the operations carried out on nuclear scientists, one was killed using a remotely detonated bomb. Between 2010 and 2012 Israel killed a further four, all with the use of local Iranian agents.
Scientists were either shot or killed by bombs attached to their cars. Each time Mossad killed a nuclear scientist, it struck at the heart of Iran's most precious state programme and embarrassed its security apparatus.
Mossad does not confine itself to carrying out assassinations in enemy countries only. On January 20, 2010, the agency killed Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, which in 2020 established formal diplomatic ties with Israel.
Al-Mabhouh was the chief of weapons procurement for Hamas's military wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades, and he was killed in his Dubai hotel room in an operation that involved 27 Mossad operatives posing as tourists.
The agents used fake passports including 12 British, six Irish, four French, four American and one German. It was a stunning operation: al-Mabhouh was tracked so fastidiously that within moments of passing immigration control he had to move his baggage trolley around one of the assassins.
IDF footage of the strike that killed Hamas chief Mohammed Deif
Once he arrived at the Al Bustan Hotel, where he was staying, and went up to room 230, the Mossad agents booked 234 just opposite. They then reprogrammed the lock so that their key for 234 would work on 230 and waited in his room for him to arrive. The next step was to secure the hallway with o
ne agent dressed as an Al Bustan Hotel employee standing guard outside.
When al-Mabhouh entered, they injected him with the muscle relaxant succinylcholine to paralyse him, before electrocuting him and suffocating him with a pillow. They then changed him into pyjamas and placed him in bed to make it look as if he had died of natural causes. The agents left shortly after; the operation took less than 24 hours.
Then there is Mossad's use of poison, which at times resembles the intrigues of a Renaissance Italian dynasty.
In 1978, Mossad killed Wadie Haddad, the head of the terror group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which was responsible for high-profile attacks against Israeli targets, including aeroplane hijackings.
According to Ronen Bergman, author of Rise And Kill First: The Secret History Of Israel's Targeted Assassinations, Mossad killed him by poisoning his toothpaste.
A deep-cover agent with access to Haddad's home switched his regular toothpaste for an identical tube containing a toxin developed in Israel. Every time Haddad brushed his teeth, the toxin entered his bloodstream. He became increasingly ill over months until he was admitted to hospital, first in Iraq where he was living, and then eventually to a hospital in East Germany.
For the trip, his aides included the poisoned toothpaste in his toiletry bag. He died ten days after being admitted. In his final days, his screams of pain were reportedly so loud that he had to be sedated. It was brutal and effective – and a warning to Israel's enemies everywhere.
But as times change, Mossad changes with them – and so do its methods of assassination. Not least through the dominant force of our age: technology.
On November 27, 2020, Mossad assassinated Iran's top nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. They shot him on a street in Absard, a city near Tehran using an AI-powered machine-gun robot operated via a satellite.
The robot had been broken down into its component parts and smuggled into Iran before being reassembled there. It was then fitted to a truck with cameras, while another vehicle three-quarters of a mile away was used to make sure Fakhrizadeh was driving the car in which he was taken out.
Once he was identified, the machine sprayed his car with 15 bullets in three bursts. The hit was so accurate that his wife, sitting in the passenger seat, was unharmed. A bomb was then detonated to destroy the robot so the Iranians could not analyse it (though this was only partially successful).
These are extraordinary acts. But it is important to understand what they mean to Israel.
'If a man comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first.' The line is from the Talmud, the primary source of Jewish religious law, and, as Bergman argues in Rise And Kill First, it stands at the heart of Israel's policy of targeted assassinations, which for Israel are the ultimate self-defence.
Nowhere is this idea more evident than in the figure of Meir Dagan, the former head of Mossad. Dagan was, to his core, a fighter. A man of whom the former Israel prime minister Ariel Sharon once said: 'Dagan's speciality is separating an Arab from his head.'
Dagan believed that Israel should only go to war 'only when the sword is on our neck'. As far as he was concerned, assassinations were a tool to neutralise enemies without recourse to war.
The belief that powered Dagan's world view – and indeed Israel's – was contained in a photograph he hung on the wall of every office he ever had. It was of a man called Baer Ehrlich, on his knees, surrounded by Nazi soldiers. Minutes after the photo was taken the Nazis shot him – without emotion.
Ehrlich was Dagan's grandfather and, for Dagan, the image was the ultimate encapsulation of the dictum: never again. Never again would Jews be powerless, never again would they die on their knees. They would fight, and never stop fighting until the end.
Bergman calculated that at the time of his book's publication in 2018, Israel had assassinated 2,700 people, more than any other state in the Western world.
Yahya Sinwar – the newly appointed and more hardline leader of Hamas – will likely soon join that number. The mastermind of the October 7 massacre, Sinwar is hiding in Gaza. Israel has vowed to find and kill him.
On October 7, Hamas murdered more Jews than at any other time since the Holocaust. The Israelis say never again, but it did happen again. Now they are making sure that the world – and above all, their enemies – understand that the price attached to taking Jewish life is a heavy one, and that Israel's enemies will continue to pay it. Wherever they are.