Mossad’s supposedly legendary ability to murder so-called “enemies” is praised by many Jews but simply shows the illegality of Israeli actions.
The recent killing in Dubai of a Hamas operative – according to former New York Times journalist and Iraq WMD story-teller Judith Miller, this was Israel’s third attempt – alerted the world to such methods once again (although an Israeli minister is now saying that the murder in Dubai wasn’t actually murder. Really.)
This account in the London Independent of Israel’s tracking and 2008 killing of Hizbollah leader Imad Mughniyeh is a remarkble story:
On Saturday morning, 2 February 2008, a man emerged from the U-Bahn, the city’s railway system, and stood outside the subway exit on the Kurfürstendamm, Berlin’s elegant shopping quarter. He had started his journey in one of the eastern suburbs of the city and its purpose was contained in the briefcase he carried. A car pulled up, the driver opened the passenger door and together they drove off.
Who the man was and what he had been asked to do was known, apart from the driver, to only Meir Dagan and a handful of senior Mossad officers in Tel Aviv. They had patiently waited for the car’s passenger to obtain what they wanted.
Six months before, the driver introduced himself to the man as Reuben. It was not his real name: like all other details about his identity, it remained in a secure room where the names of all current katsas [field agents] were kept in Mossad headquarters. A few days ago, the man had left a message at one of the agreed dead letter-boxes, which Reuben regularly checked, to the effect that he was ready to deliver what he had been asked to provide in return for a substantial sum of euros, half as a down payment, the balance on delivery of what was now in his briefcase.
They were photos of Imad Mughniyeh. After Osama bin Laden, he was the world’s most-wanted terrorist.