Israel’s Assassination Campaigns, from Operation Wrath of God to Gaza, Examined in Review of Mossad History

The killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and several other senior Iranian officials in the first hours of the Iran War, Andrew Cockburn writes, confirms that assassination is a routine tool of Israeli policy. Over the past two years, he says, Israel has targeted the military and political leadership of Hizbullah, Hamas and the Houthis, often eliminating officials soon after they replaced their predecessors. Targets have not always been senior figures. Cockburn reports that last October an Israeli airstrike in southern Lebanon killed two engineers, Ahmad Saad and Mustafa Rizk, employees of a development organisation run by Hizbullah, who were on their way to assess war damage to buildings and infrastructure.

Cockburn traces the use of political murder back to the medieval Ismaili sect known as the Assassins, and to later groups including the Social Revolutionaries in tsarist Russia. He writes that the Zionist militant organisations Irgun and Lehi also used assassination against British officials and others who stood in the way of the emerging Israeli state. Among their victims, he says, was Count Folke Bernadotte, the Swedish UN mediator, who was shot in September 1948 on the orders of Lehi leader Yitzhak Shamir, according to the author. Shamir was later recruited to lead Mossad’s first targeted killing squad, and he became foreign minister in 1980 and prime minister three years later.

Citing the Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman’s book Rise and Kill First (2018), Cockburn writes that the programme grew steadily more elaborate. For the proposed killing of the Palestinian fighter Iyad Batat in the West Bank in 1999, Bergman reports that commanders assembled a joint force drawn from no fewer than nine separate security agencies and units. Bergman also reports that by 2000 Israel had launched some five hundred targeted killing operations, and that it had carried out eight hundred more by the time his book appeared in 2018.

Cockburn describes the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, in which Black September, a militant Palestinian group, took eleven members of the Israeli Olympic team hostage and killed them. Most of the hostages died during a failed rescue attempt by German police. In response, he writes, the Israeli prime minister, Golda Meir, authorised Mossad to eliminate the organisers of the attack in a covert campaign called Operation Wrath of God. The campaign began with the shooting of Wael Zwaiter in Rome, and Cockburn says the hit team killed nine people over the following two years.

In July 1973, according to Cockburn, Mossad agents shot a man in Norway whom they believed to be the Munich planner Ali Hassan Salameh. The victim was in fact Ahmed Bouchiki, a Moroccan waiter who had lived in Lillehammer for the previous nine years and was killed as he walked home from the cinema with his Norwegian wife. Cockburn writes that the next day Norwegian police apprehended members of the team at the airport. Norway convicted and imprisoned five of the six team members the police caught, but they were pardoned and released after less than two years. Cockburn notes that Norway and other European governments publicly condemned the killing.

Cockburn draws on Aviva Guttmann’s book Operation Wrath of God (2025) to describe the role of European security agencies. Guttmann, he writes, found that Mossad relied on these agencies for intelligence on Palestinian activities, and that they helped confirm when targets could be reached. The mechanism was the Club de Berne, an informal association of security agencies, mostly European but also including Mossad and the FBI, set up in 1969. Guttmann, working from Swiss national archives, found thousands of messages from a counter-terrorism programme called Kilowatt, which Cockburn says charted Palestinian movements and plans in detail. He also reports that Kilowatt kept Israel informed about local police monitoring of Mossad’s own operations, and that the club later expanded and now has an operational headquarters in The Hague.

Cockburn argues that the United States later adopted a similar approach after 9/11, using drones, laser-guided missiles and elite units against figures including Mullah Omar and Saddam Hussein. He writes that a 2007 secret US army intelligence study concluded that high-value targeting had increased American casualties in Iraq, but that the approach continued. Turning to Gaza, Cockburn states that Israel has carried out assassinations there on an unprecedented scale over the past two and a half years, and that victims have been selected and located with the aid of AI systems, which he says also estimate the number of civilians likely to die in a strike. He reports no sign that the Club de Berne’s members have objected.

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