'Exploding phone, toxic spray': A timeline of covert Israeli attacks | World news

Israel has neither confirmed nor denied responsibility for the attack, which comes after nearly a year of cross-border rocket fire between the two sides as part of a second front in the Gaza war.

United Nations, government and technology industry officials have puzzled over how the coordinated series of attacks was carried out, but veterans of Israel's Mossad and Shin Bet intelligence services have spoken out about previous assassinations – some of which required a high degree of technical and operational ingenuity.

Fatal call

The Shin Bet used a secretly rigged cell phone in Gaza in 1996 to kill Yahya Ayyash, a Hamas bomb-maker nicknamed “the Engineer.” A Palestinian intermediary gave Ayyash the phone to take a call from his father. When Israeli eavesdroppers determined it was Ayyash's voice on the line, the phone was remotely detonated, causing a fatal head injury.

Throat poison

In retaliation for a series of suicide attacks by Hamas in 1997, then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, during his first term in office, ordered the killing of the Palestinian Islamist group's politburo chief, Khaled Mashaal, in the Jordanian capital Amman.

Two undercover Mossad agents sprayed poison on Meshaal's neck as he got out of his car for an appointment. One of them opened a previously shaken Coca-Cola can to provide an innocuous explanation for the supposed liquid. The plan failed because Meshaal's daughter ran after him, whereupon an agent turned around and noticed the would-be assassins.

They were caught by Jordanian police and only repatriated after Israel provided an antidote to save Meshaal's life.

Fake tourists

Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, an international arms supplier for Hamas, was found dead in his Dubai hotel room in 2010. Emirati authorities initially assumed he died of natural causes, but reopened the case after the Gaza-based Palestinian group accused Israel of killing him.

The subsequent investigation uncovered video footage of a Mossad hit squad using cloned European passports and posing as tennis-playing tourists, businessmen or hotel employees, surveilling Mabhouh and entering his hotel room. An autopsy revealed that Mabhouh had been drugged and suffocated.

Traffic explosions

Between 2010 and 2020, about half a dozen Iranian nuclear scientists were killed or injured in gun attacks or explosions that authorities blamed on Israel. Most of these attacks were caused by magnetized bombs attached to vehicles by passing motorcyclists, Iranian state media reported.

Israel has not confirmed that it was behind any of the attacks, although its officials admitted to being involved in a secret war with Iran. Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett later claimed responsibility for a similar assassination attempt in the Iranian capital in 2022.

Satellite Sniper

Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, Iran's top nuclear scientist, was shot dead in 2020 while driving in a convoy on the outskirts of Tehran. Some Iranian media reports said Israel used a satellite-guided sniper rifle mounted on the back of a pickup truck and equipped with AI-powered facial recognition. Israel did not confirm the killing, although Netanyahu had previously identified Fakhrizadeh as the head of a secret Iranian nuclear weapons program and said, “Remember his name.”