Israel is known for carrying out high-profile attacks. But are they an effective tactic?

The extraordinary attacks on Hezbollah this week, in which thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies exploded over two days, were a stunning success for Israel’s spy agency and a humiliating blow to the Lebanese militants and their Iranian patrons, Western officials and former intelligence agents say.

But the attacks, which Lebanese officials say killed more than 30 people and wounded thousands over two days, are just the latest in a decades-long series of brazen covert operations in which Israel has pursued its enemies, combining high-tech tools with old-fashioned espionage techniques.

Using letter bombs, poison, booby traps, armed drones and an AI-assisted machine gun, the Israeli security services have pursued their opponents with relentless determination. Even before the country was founded in 1948, a Zionist underground movement had been assassinating British officers and policemen, seeing them as obstacles to the creation of a Jewish state.

For years, Israel has viewed “targeted killings” as a way to deter attacks on the country, stoke fear among enemies and exact revenge. But the operations have created ethical dilemmas for Israeli governments and have often yielded only temporary successes without lasting effects, experts and former intelligence officers say.

“The impact is short-lived. Hamas, Hezbollah and the Iranians are quickly picking up replacements for those who have been killed,” said Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer who served in the Middle East. Iran’s nuclear program is closer to a bomb than it has ever been, even after the deaths of several nuclear scientists, he said.

Letter bombs

One of Israel’s first intelligence hunts focused on the Holocaust mastermind, Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann, who sent millions of Jews to death camps. In 1960, the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad tracked him down in Argentina, captured him, sedated him, then dressed him in an Israeli aircrew uniform before smuggling him past Argentine police onto a plane bound for Israel. Eichmann was put on trial, with dozens of Holocaust victims testifying. He was found guilty and hanged.

In the early 1960s, Israel was concerned about Egypt’s missile program, which required the technical expertise of German scientists with Nazi pasts. As part of Operation Damocles, the Mossad attacked German scientists with letter bombs and threatened their families.

Egypt abandoned its missile program in 1963. However, Mossad’s actions alarmed Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, who demanded the resignation of the head of the intelligence service.

After Palestinian militants kidnapped and murdered 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, Israel launched a covert campaign — dubbed Operation Wrath of God — to hunt down those responsible.

The campaign involved a nighttime commando raid into Beirut to attack three Palestine Liberation Organization figures, with teams arriving at the beach by boat. Ehud Barak, who later became prime minister, led the raid, disguised as a woman with a brunette wig.

Some of Israel’s assassination operations have ended in miserable failure or tragic mistakes.

In 1973, Israeli assassins believed they were targeting a key figure in the hostage-taking and killings at the Munich Olympics. But they mistook a Moroccan waiter, Ahmed Bouchikhi, for Ali Hassan Salameh, an assistant to PLO leader Yasser Arafat. They killed Bouchikhi in the Norwegian ski resort of Lillehammer. Norwegian authorities soon learned that Israel was behind the assassination, and an Israeli spy network in Europe was exposed.

Nearly four decades later, Israel killed a senior Hamas official, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, in a Dubai hotel as part of a complex plot involving more than two dozen Mossad agents. But later, using hours of security footage, local police were able to reconstruct the team’s movements from the moment they entered the country with fake passports to the moment they left. Their passport photos were plastered across media outlets worldwide, showing how difficult it would have been for a hit squad to track a target in an Eichmann-style operation in 2010 without leaving an electronic trail.

Exploding cell phone

In a 1988 operation to kill Ahmed Jibril, a Palestinian fighter aligned with Hezbollah, an Israeli military team used a trained dog loaded with explosives as part of an effort to track down a target in a labyrinth of caves on the Lebanese coast. The explosives were supposed to be detonated remotely. But the operation was marred by a series of setbacks, according to journalist Ronen Bergman’s book “Rise and Kill First.” The trained dog was scared off by gunfire and fled. Hezbollah later found the dog. Jibril, it turned out, wasn’t even there at the time of the raid.

In an echo of this year’s attacks in Lebanon, Israel killed the hacker bomber Yahya Ayyash in 1996 with a cellphone rigged with explosives. When he answered the phone and spoke to his father, Israelis listened, and a voice recognition expert confirmed it was Ayyash. The explosives were detonated remotely, killing Ayyash.

Drones and motorcycles

The advent of armed drones, which Israel pioneered in the 1990s, has dramatically expanded the scope of assassination operations without having to risk the lives of Israeli soldiers or spies.

As Iran’s nuclear program expanded in the early 21st century, the Israeli Mossad focused its efforts on the scientists overseeing the program, according to former U.S. and Israeli officials.

Scores of scientists were killed by motorcyclists who attached magnetic bombs to their cars. Then in September 2021, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, considered a key figure in Iran’s now-suspended nuclear weapons program, was killed when his car was hit by bullets in the city of Absad, east of Tehran. Fakhrizadeh was later found to have been killed by an AI-powered remote-controlled machine gun, according to Iranian media reports and a New York Times account.

Since Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, Israel has stepped up its covert operations, killing senior Hamas and Hezbollah members, as well as Iranian generals visiting Syria, with drone strikes. Iran was stunned in April when Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, was killed in a car bomb attack while he was staying in the Iranian capital, Tehran.

Mossad chief David Barnea has vowed to eliminate all those involved in the October 7 attack on Israel “directly or indirectly,” including “planners and envoys.”

“It will take time, just like it took time after the Munich massacre, but we will get them wherever they are,” Barnea said.