Operation Wrath of God

Operation Wrath of God, covert assassination campaign carried out by Israel to avenge the kidnapping and murder of 11 Israeli athletes by Palestinian militants in September 1972 at the Munich Olympics.

Although Israel had historically targeted the leaders of organizations such as Fatah, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the frequency of such assassinations by Israel escalated dramatically in the wake of the massacre in Munich. A secret Israeli committee chaired by Prime Minister Golda Meir and Defense Minister Moshe Dayan is said to have authorized the assassination of everyone directly or indirectly involved with Black September, the Fatah-affiliated group that had orchestrated the Munich killings. The Wrath of God hit squad—code-named Bayonet—was made up of members of Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, and supported by special operations teams from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). The group spent years tracking down and killing those suspected of planning or participating in the Munich massacre. Three of the eight militants who had killed the athletes survived the massacre and were released weeks later from custody by the West German government in exchange for the crew of a hijacked Lufthansa jet; the other five died in a gun battle with police during a failed attempt to rescue the hostages.

The hit squad first killed Wael Zwaiter, a PLO organizer and cousin of Yāsir ʿArafāt, shooting him in the lobby of his Rome apartment building in October 1972. Mahmoud Hamshari, the PLO representative in Paris, was targeted next. After a Wrath of God member, posing as an Italian journalist, scheduled a telephone interview with Hamshari in December 1972, Wrath of God explosives experts broke into his home and planted a bomb in his telephone. Hamshari was called at the time arranged for the interview, and, when he identified himself, the bomb was activated remotely. He died in the explosion.

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Four other suspects—Basil al-Kubaisi, Hussein Abad al-Chir, Zaid Muchassi, and Mohammed Boudia—were all killed during the next few months. The most spectacular mission in the Wrath of God campaign took place in April 1973. Ehud Barak, the leader of the IDF’s elite Sayeret Matcal unit, developed an audacious plan to strike at PLO leadership. Dubbed Operation Spring of Youth, the mission involved the amphibious insertion of commando teams into Beirut. Once ashore, they coordinated their efforts with Mossad agents already in the city and deflected attention by donning civilian clothing. While other commando teams staged diversionary raids throughout the city and a squad of Israeli paratroopers assaulted the PFLP headquarters, the main force targeted Muhammad Youssef Al-Najjar, Kamal Adwan, and Kamal Nasser, killing all three.

In 1973 the squad misidentified one of its targets and mistakenly killed an innocent man in Lillehammer, Norway. The investigation of the crime by Norwegian authorities led to the arrest and conviction of five Mossad operatives as well as to the unraveling of Mossad’s extensive network of agents and safehouses throughout Europe. Meir, responding to intense international pressure, suspended the targeted assassination program. Wrath of God’s intended target in Lillehammer had been Ali Hassan Salameh, a Fatah and Black September operations chief known to Mossad as the “Red Prince.” The Wrath of God program was reactivated for a final mission in 1979, when the squad assassinated Salameh in Beirut with a car bomb placed along a route that he frequented. The Wrath of God campaign was dramatized in the Steven Spielberg film Munich (2005).