Israel has a long history of hunting down its enemies

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

But the attacks, which Lebanese authorities said killed more than 30 people over two days while wounding thousands, are only the latest in a decadeslong history of audacious covert operations in which Israel has hunted down its enemies through a combination of high-tech tools and old-fashioned spycraft.

Using letter bombs, poison, booby traps, armed drones and an artificial intelligence-assisted robotic machine gun, Israel’s security services have pursued their adversaries with relentless determination. Even before the country’s founding in 1948, the Zionist underground movement assassinated British military officers and police, seeing them as obstacles to creating a Jewish state.

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

“The impact is short-lived. Hamas, Hezbollah and the Iranians are quick to select successors to those assassinated,” said Bruce Riedel, a former career CIA officer who served in the Middle East. Iran’s nuclear program is closer to building a bomb than ever, even after several nuclear scientists were killed, he said.

Letter bombs

One of Israeli intelligence’s early manhunts focused on a mastermind of the Holocaust, the Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann, who sent millions of Jews to death camps. In 1960, Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency tracked him down in Argentina, captured him, sedated him and then dressed him in an Israeli flight crew uniform before it smuggled 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 alarmed at a rocket program in Egypt that enlisted the technical expertise of German scientists with Nazi pasts. In Operation Damocles, Mossad went after the German scientists with letter bombs and threatened their families.

Egypt dropped the rocket program in 1963. But the Mossad…