Israel has long been accused of carrying out top-secret operations on foreign soil targeting Iran and its terror proxies — even before Tuesday’s attack on Hezbollah that left thousands injured after their pagers exploded.
While Hezbollah and Lebanese officials have blamed Israel over the attack that killed nine people and injured about 2,800 others, the Jewish state has remained mum on the bloody operation.
But silence is a tactic repeatedly employed by Israel, who Iran and its terror organizations have blamed for assassinations in Tehran and across the Middle East going as far back as 1997.
Here are some of the wildest covert operations allegedly carried out by Israel:
Bomb kills Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh
On July 31st, 2024, Iran accused Israel of planting a bomb inside the Tehran facility housing former Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh, who died when it was detonated.
The bomb was hidden inside the guest house approximately two months before Haniyeh’s visit, five of the Middle Eastern officials told the New York Times.
The explosion was so targeted that the room where the leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Ziyad al-Nakhalah, next door sustained little damage, Iranian officials told The Times.
Iran’s nuclear program founder slain by AI machine gun
In December 2020, Israel allegedly used a satellite-controlled machine gun equipped with Artificial Intelligence to kill Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the man who founded Iran’s nuclear program.
Fakhrizadeh had a security detail of 11 guards while traveling with his wife on Nov. 27 in a car on a highway outside Tehran when an automatic machine gun outfitted with AI and an advanced camera zoomed in on his face and fired 13 times, according to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
Remote bombs take out nuclear scientists
Before Fakhrizadeh’s death, Israel allegedly targeted several of Tehran’s top scientists in an effort to stifle its secret nuclear program.
In 2010, Massaoud Ali-Mohammadi and Majid Shahriari, two nuclear scientists in Tehran, were blown up by a remotely detonated bomb hooked up to a motorcycle.
Stuxnet virus infects Tehran’s tech
The same year that the two nuclear scientists were killed, Iran’s nuclear program was attacked by the Stuxnet cyberweapon.
The virus temporarily disabled 1,000 centrifuges that the Iranians were using to enrich uranium, a cyberattack that was eventually reported to be a joint effort by the US and Israel.
Israel poisons Hamas chief in failed assassination bid
In 1997, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had ordered the hit on former Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal, with Israeli agents injecting him with poison just outside his office in the Jordan capital of Amman.
The blatant assassination attempt sparked such fury from Jordan’s king that he threatened to walk out of a peace treaty with Netanyahu and hang the would-be assassin’s if Israel did not hand over the antidote.
