By Rebecca Armitage and Basel Hindeleh for the ABC
Thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies have blown up in a coordinated attack in Lebanon. Photo: AFP / Anwar Amro
It was early afternoon in Lebanon when pagers clipped to the belts of thousands of men beeped simultaneously.
Some were shopping for groceries, others were winding their motorbikes through heavy traffic, but the men apparently had one thing in common.
The pagers flashed a message that looked to be from Hezbollah's leadership, according to the New York Times.
But then, according to witnesses and CCTV footage, the beepers became extremely hot and suddenly exploded, leaving horrifying wounds to the stomachs, hands and faces of those holding them.
At least 12 people are believed to be dead, and 2800 others were injured. At least one of the victims was a bystander - according to the country's health ministry, an eight-year-old girl in the Bekaa Valley died in a blast.
That was Tuesday. On Wednesday, more blasts echoed across Lebanon.
This time it was hand-held radio devices used by Hezbollah that were blowing up, with state media reporting at least another 14 more people had been killed and hundreds more injured.
On 18 September, hand-held radio devices used by Hezbollah blew up. Photo: ANWAR AMRO/AFP
Hezbollah swiftly blamed Israel for orchestrating Tuesday's attack, promising "fair punishment" for its sworn enemy.
The Iran-backed group and Israel have been trading rockets, missiles and drones since October last year when the country's war on Gaza began following the Hamas-led attacks.
Israel has refused to comment on either incident, but a picture is beginning to emerge of how the audacious plot may have been carried out.
A shipment of pagers with Gold Apollo branding ordered from BAC appears to have been tampered with before they reached Lebanon, according to the New York Times and Reuters.
Hezbollah relies on pagers - which operate on radio frequencies instead of the internet - in part to elude Israeli surveillance of their conversations.
The group's leader in February went as far as telling all members to abandon their "agent" phones, to "bury it, put it in a metal box and lock it".
But at some point, before they arrived in Lebanon, it appears that a tiny amount of explosive was hidden inside each pager, along with a switch that could have been remotely detonated.
While Israel's alleged involvement may never be confirmed or denied, the country's security and intelligence agencies have been linked to a string of assassination plots over the years.
From poison hidden in toothpaste to spies posing as tennis players in a Dubai hotel, these are just some of the elaborate assassinations that may or may not be the work of Israel.
Operation Wrath of God
At the 1972 Olympics in Munich, eight men in tracksuits scaled the fence and broke into the athlete's village, carrying with them Kalashnikovs and grenades.
They were members of the group Black September, an affiliate of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), and they killed two members of the Israeli team, and took nine others hostage.
The terrorists demanded the release of 200 Palestinian prisoners being held in Israel, but negotiations swiftly devolved when they saw on live television that German snipers were creeping into the Olympic Village to surround them.
Two German agents getting in position in the Olympic Village in Munich, on 5 September 1972. Photo: AFP
They demanded to be allowed to fly to Cairo with their hostages, and a plot to ambush them at a nearby air force base was hopelessly bungled.
All nine hostages were killed before German authorities shot dead five of the eight terrorists. A West German policeman was also killed in the exchange of gunfire.
The incident shocked the world, and triggered an outpouring of grief in Israel, after a group of young athletes and their coaches were killed while simply trying to represent their country on the world stage.
Members of the Israeli Olympic Team were taken hostage by armed terrorists at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. Photo: (Photo by Russell Mcphedran/The Sydney Morning Herald/Fairfax Media via Getty Images via Getty Images)
Israel's government also quietly vowed revenge.
In the years after the attack, Israel's spy agency Mossad embarked on a campaign called Operation Wrath Of God to assassinate those involved in planning and carrying out the massacre.
One man was shot 12 times while walking home from dinner in Rome, while another was lured into a Parisian apartment and then blown up with a bomb hidden in a ringing phone on a desk.
Israel never publicly claimed responsibility for any of the killings during the campaign, which is believed to have lasted up to two decades.
Some of those killed were never conclusively linked to the Munich massacre, and in one case, an operation to kill a terrorist known as the "Red Prince" ended in tragedy when assassins targeted the wrong man.
After every assassination, the dead man's family would receive flowers and an unsigned condolence card bearing the same words.
"A reminder we do not forget or forgive," the card read.
Car bombs
Israel entered an era of assassinations just months before the Munich attacks in 1972.
Its first target was a Palestinian author and journalist who at the time was the spokesman for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the editor of its magazine.
The chosen weapon was a simple car bomb - but the intended effect was to send a clear message.
On the summer morning of 8 July 1972, Ghassan Kanafani had walked out of his home in Beirut ready to take his 17-year-old niece Lamis Najm to register for university.
But as soon as he turned the key, his grey Austin 1100 blew up, completely incinerating his body and flinging Lamis's body far away, killing her.
All that was left was a mangled mess of metal and explosion markings on the walls nearby.
Investigations by the PFLP found that explosives were placed under the driver's seat.
Israel did not publicly claim the attack, but it was clear from media reports at the time it was in retaliation for the Lod airport massacre.
Kanafani was 36 years old when he died, but had already been an accomplished writer with dozens of articles and 18 published books, the most famous being Returning to Haifa.
His obituary in Lebanon's Daily Star at the time labelled him "a commando who never fired a gun, whose weapon was a ball-point pen".
In a now famous interview with the ABC's Richard Carleton two years prior in 1970, Kanafani had rejected the notion of an agreement with Israel.
"You don't mean exactly peace talks, you mean capitulation, surrendering," he replied when asked why not talk to the Israelis.
"That's kind of conversation between the sword and the neck, you mean."
He added that he had never seen talks between "a colonialist case and a National Liberation Movement".
To Israel, targeting Kanafani was seen as a way to strike at the heart of the Palestinian resistance movement.
His writings had been inspiring young Palestinians made refugees and at the same time angering Israel's political sphere.
Hundreds of thousands of people poured out into the streets to mourn his death, and to this day he is hailed as one of the Palestinian greats.
Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi wrote in his book titled The Hundred Years' War on Palestine that "some of these assassinations were driven by political rather than military or security considerations".
Poisoned toothpaste or chocolate
In 1978, Wadie Haddad, a militant who led the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, started to feel sick.
He checked into a hospital in East Berlin and died 10 days later.
While his death remains shrouded in mystery, and doctors initially suspected he was suffering from leukaemia, investigative journalists have since found evidence that suggests he was poisoned.
Haddad was responsible for several international plane hijackings in the 60s and 70s, including forcing an Air France flight with 248 passengers on board to land in Uganda in 1976.
One theory is that Mossad decided to take advantage of Haddad's sweet tooth, sending him Belgian chocolate laced with poison over six months.
"This elimination was very successful because, as soon as this person was taken out and stopped working, in effect all the terrorist activity, especially the hijacking of airplanes, ceased altogether," Israeli journalist Aaron Klein said in 2006.
But in 2018, another theory emerged.
According to documents found by New York Times journalist Ronen Bergman, a deep-cover Mossad hit squad snuck into Haddad's apartment and swapped out his toothpaste for an identical tube containing a mysterious toxin.
"They call the poison the potion of gods - that was the nickname - and they poured that into his toothpaste which he used quite frequently," Bergman told NPR in 2018.
"Then he got ill. Nobody knew what happened to him. And the physicians in Baghdad couldn't do anything."
He was flown to East Berlin for treatment, where doctors found the suspicious toothpaste in his toiletries bag.
Bergman said Haddad would have died an agonising death, with his screams echoing through the East German hospital, before he finally succumbed to the toxin in his bloodstream.
Dressing up as tennis players
In 2010, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh walked out of Dubai International Airport, completely oblivious to the group of foreign assassins on his tail.
He was the co-founder of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades - the military wing of Hamas - and was wanted by Israel for gun-running and the alleged kidnap and murder of two Israeli soldiers in 1989.
As he checked into the Al-Bustan Rotana hotel, al-Mabhouh took the usual precautions of a wanted man: he asked for a room with no balcony, no connecting doors and sealed windows.
But when he went out for an hour to do some shopping, the hit squad watching him moved in.
Dressed as tennis players, they sauntered around the hotel as if they were guests, but when no-one was looking, slipped into al-Mabhouh's room and waited for his return.
It's not clear exactly what happened inside that hotel room, but the next morning, a maid became concerned when she couldn't get inside.
The 49-year-old was found dead in his bed, with a small vial of medicine beside him.
Dubai police coroner Fawzi Benomran said authorities initially thought he died of natural causes, describing the incident as "one of the most challenging cases" his department has ever faced.
Investigators later concluded he was ambushed when he entered his hotel room, injected with succinylcholine, a quick-acting, paralytic muscle relaxant, and smothered with a pillow.
Dubai authorities concluded that 26 suspects had already fled the country by the time al-Mabhouh's body was discovered.
The alleged hit squad members were placed on Interpol's most-wanted list after Dubai police alleged they travelled under aliases, using fake British, Irish, French, German and Australian passports, to slip in and out of the country.
Israel denied any involvement, but the UK, Australia and Ireland accused the country of forging their passports before each expelling an Israeli diplomat in protest.
While two Palestinians were alleged to have been involved in the operation, the trail soon went cold.
Dubai police chief Lieutenant General Dahi Khalfan Tamim later announced that an unnamed Western country had arrested a top suspect in the case, but he was frustrated that they were refusing to share any details.
"I do not have an explanation for why they do not want to make it public, but there is a need for more transparency in this case," he told the National newspaper.
"Why is it that every time an Israeli is involved in a crime, everyone goes mute? We want anyone who is dealing with this case to deal with it as a security case, and not to pay attention to any other consideration."
- This story was first published by the ABC