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Harari escaped to Israel, and it is possible that others were able to evade capture with him. An article in Time magazine immediately after the killing put the total number of Mossad personnel at 15, [13] which would also be similar to the above descriptions. A markedly different account comes from the book Vengeance , where the author states that according to his source, Mossad set up a five-man unit of trained intelligence personnel which he [the source] led in Europe. The book also says that the team operated outside of direct government control, and that its only communications were with Harari.
Several hours before each assassination, each target's family received flowers with a condolence card reading: The first assassination occurred on October 16, , when Palestinian Wael Zwaiter was killed in Rome. Mossad agents had been waiting for him to return from dinner, and shot him twelve times. At the time Zwaiter was the PLO representative in Italy, and while Israel privately claimed he was a member of Black September and was involved in a failed plot against an El Al airliner, members of the PLO argued that he was in no way connected.
Israel believed that he was the leader of Black September in France. Using an agent posing as an Italian journalist, Mossad lured him from his apartment in Paris to allow a demolition team to enter and install a bomb underneath a desk telephone. On December 8, , the agent posing as a journalist phoned Hamshari's apartment and asked if he was speaking to Hamshari. After Hamshari identified himself, the agent signalled to other colleagues, who then sent a detonation signal down the telephone line, causing the bomb to explode. Hamshari was mortally wounded in the explosion, but managed to remain conscious long enough to tell detectives what had happened.
Hamshari died in a hospital several weeks later. Moments later, a bomb planted under his bed was remotely detonated, killing him and destroying the room. Israel believed him to be the head of Black September in Cyprus, though another reason for his assassination may have been his close ties with the KGB.
On April 6, , Basil al-Kubaissi, a law professor at the American University of Beirut suspected by Israel of providing arms logistics for Black September as well as being involved in other Palestinian plots, [21] was gunned down in Paris while returning home from dinner. As in previous assassinations, he was shot around 12 times by two Mossad agents. Three of the targets on the Mossad's list lived in heavily guarded houses in Lebanon that were beyond the reach of previous assassination methods. In order to assassinate them, Operation Spring of Youth was launched as a sub-operation of the larger "Wrath of God" campaign.
On the night of April 9, , Sayeret Matkal , Shayetet 13 , and Sayeret Tzanhanim commandos landed on the coast of Lebanon in Zodiac speedboats launched from Israeli Navy missile boats offshore. The commandos were met by Mossad agents, who drove them to their targets in cars rented the previous day, and later drove them back to the beaches for extraction.
The commandos were disguised as civilians, and some were dressed as women. During the operation, two Lebanese police officers, an Italian citizen, and Najjar's wife were also killed. One Israeli commando was wounded. Sayeret Tzanhanim paratroopers raided a six-story building that served as the headquarters of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The paratroopers met strong resistance and lost two soldiers, but managed to destroy the building. Shayetet 13 naval commandos and Sayeret Tzanhanim paratroopers also raided PLO arms-manufacturing facilities and fuel dumps.
Three attacks quickly followed the Lebanon operation. Mossad agents also began to follow Mohammad Boudia , the Algerian -born director of operations for Black September in France, who was known for his disguises and womanizing. On June 28, , Boudia was killed in Paris by a pressure-activated bomb packed with heavy nuts and bolts placed under his car seat.
According to police, both men were shot with silenced weapons at point-blank range. Kamal Husain, deputy director of the PLO office in Rome, was killed by a shrapnel bomb placed under the back seat of his car as he drove home, less than seven hours after he had visited the home of Mayer and helped the police in their investigation.
Nazal was shot four times in the head. Mossad continued to search for Ali Hassan Salameh , nicknamed the Red Prince, who was the head of Force 17 and the Black September operative believed by Israel to be the mastermind behind the Munich massacre. This belief has since been challenged by accounts of senior Black September officials, who say that while he was involved in many attacks in Europe, Salameh was not at all connected with the events in Munich.
Almost a full year after Munich, Mossad believed they had finally located Salameh in the small Norwegian town Lillehammer. On July 21, , in what would become known as the Lillehammer affair , a team of Mossad agents shot and killed Ahmed Bouchiki , a Moroccan waiter unrelated to the Munich attack and Black September, after an informant mistakenly identified Bouchiki as Salameh. Six Mossad agents, including two women, were arrested by local police, while others, including the team leader, Michael Harari, managed to escape back to Israel.
Five of the captured were convicted of the killing and imprisoned, but were released and returned to Israel in Victor Ostrovsky claimed that Salameh was instrumental in leading Mossad off course by feeding it false information about his whereabouts. In January , Mossad agents covertly deployed to Switzerland after receiving information that Salameh would meet PLO leaders in a church on January Two assassins entered the church at the time of the meeting, and encountered three men who appeared to be Arab. One of them made a move for his weapon, and all three were then immediately shot and killed.
The Mossad agents continued into the church to search for Salameh, but did not find him. In a short time, the decision was made to abort the mission and escape. Shortly afterward, three Mossad operatives travelled to London to meet with a source who offered information on Salameh. When the source failed to show up, the team members began suspecting they were under surveillance. A female assassin-for-hire seduced one of the agents in a hotel, then shot him dead in his hotel room.
The Mossad team members located the woman in Amsterdam three months later, and she was killed near her home on August 21 after she instinctively reached for a weapon as the team approached her. Local sources revealed that she was a freelance assassin, and it was never learned who exactly contracted her to kill the agent. The kidon team leader was later reprimanded for acting outside the assigned scope of the mission. She looked us all directly in the eye with cold detached hatred.
Her face reflected nothing but disdain and defiance before we killed her. Following the incident, operation commander Michael Harari ordered the mission to kill Salameh be aborted. The kidon team, however, elected to ignore the order and try one more time to kill Salameh. Intelligence placed Salameh at a house in Tarifa , Spain. As three agents moved toward the house, they were approached by an Arab security guard. The guard raised an AK assault rifle, and was immediately shot.
The operation was aborted, and the team escaped to a safe house. In the aftermath of the Lillehammer affair, international outrage prompted Golda Meir to order the suspension of Operation "Wrath of God". Mossad began surveillance of Salameh's movements after tracking him to Beirut during late autumn of In November , a female Mossad agent identifying herself as Erika Chambers entered Lebanon with a British passport issued in , and rented an apartment on the Rue Verdun, a street frequently used by Salameh. Several other agents arrived, including two using the pseudonyms Peter Scriver and Roland Kolberg, traveling with British and Canadian passports respectively.
Some time after their arrival a Volkswagen packed with plastic explosives was parked along Rue Verdun within view of the rented apartment. After five unsuccessful attempts, [37] Mossad had assassinated Salameh. However, the blast also killed four innocent bystanders, including a British student and a German nun, and injured 18 other people in the vicinity.
Immediately following the operation the three Mossad officers fled without trace, as well as up to 14 other agents believed to have been involved in the operation. On October 29, they were released in exchange for the hostages onboard hijacked Lufthansa Flight and travelled to Libya, where they went into hiding. It had been thought that Adnan Al-Gashey and Mohammed Safady were both assassinated by Mossad several years after the massacre; Al-Gashey was found after making contact with a cousin in a Gulf State , and Safady was found by remaining in touch with family in Lebanon.
Klein, who wrote that Adnan died of heart failure in the s and that Safady was killed by Christian Phalangists in Lebanon in the early s. Along with direct assassinations, Mossad used a variety of other means to respond to the Munich massacre and deter future terrorist action. Mossad engaged in a campaign of letter bombs against Palestinian officials across Europe.
Former Mossad katsa Victor Ostrovsky claimed that Mossad also used psychological warfare tactics such as running obituaries of still-living militants and sending highly detailed personal information to others. Thomas further claimed that after each killing, Mossad's psychological warfare department leaked notices about the dead militant to Arabic-language newspapers throughout the Middle East. Several assassinations or assassination attempts have been attributed to the "Wrath of God" campaign, although doubt exists as to whether Mossad was behind them, with breakaway Palestinian factions being suspected of carrying them out.
The assassination is suspected of being the work of either Mossad or the Abu Nidal Organization. On July 27, Responsibility for the attack has been placed by various sources on Mossad, other Palestinians, and possibly Egypt. Officials at the PLO information and liaison office in Brussels issued a statement accusing Israel of being behind the killing. Daoud survived the attack. Black September did attempt and carry out a number of attacks and hostage takings against Israel.
Similar to the Mossad letter-bomb campaign, dozens of letter bombs were sent from Amsterdam to Israeli diplomatic posts around the world in September and October The planned visit was placed under a regimen of strict secrecy in Israel, and news of the upcoming visit was probably leaked by a pro-Palestinian priest in the Vatican Secretariat of State. Salameh's goal was to kill not only Meir, but also key cabinet ministers and senior Mossad officers accompanying her. At the time, Salameh was negotiating with the Soviet Union , asking for safe haven, and he hoped that by the time Israel recovered from this blow, he and his men would be in the Soviet Union and out of Israel's reach.
Black September smuggled several shoulder-launched Strela 2 missiles to Bari , Italy, from Dubrovnik , Yugoslavia , by boat. The missiles were then smuggled to Rome and positioned around Fiumicino Airport shortly before Meir's arrival. To divert Mossad's vigilance away from Rome in the run-up to the attack, Salameh planned a terrorist attack on the Israeli embassy in Bangkok , Thailand.
On December 28, , four Black September members took over the Israeli embassy in Bangkok, holding 12 hostages. They raised the PLO flag over the building, and threatened to kill the hostages unless 36 PLO prisoners were released. The building was surrounded by Thai troops and police. The option of a rescue operation was considered in Israel but ruled out. A rescue operation was considered a logistical impossibility, and it was also thought that as the embassy was in busy central Bangkok, the Thai government would never allow the possibility of a shootout to occur.
Though their demands were not met, negotiations secured the release of all the hostages and the Black September militants were given safe passage to Cairo. Mossad found out about the plan to assassinate Golda Meir on January 14, , when a local volunteer informed Mossad that he had handled two telephone calls from a payphone in an apartment block where PLO members sometimes stayed. The calls were in Arabic , which he spoke. Speaking in code, the caller stated that it was "time to deliver the birthday candles for the celebration".
Mossad Director-General Zvi Zamir was convinced that this was a coded order connected to an upcoming attack. Zamir had been convinced that the Bangkok embassy raid was a diversion for a larger attack, due to the participants in the raid having so easily given up, something he did not expect from a group as well-trained, financed, strategically cunning, and motivated as Black September. Zamir further interpreted that "birthday candles" could refer to weapons, and the most likely one with a candle connotation was a rocket. Zamir linked the possible upcoming missile attack with Meir's upcoming arrival, and guessed that Black September was planning to shoot down Meir's plane.
Card Name: Wrath of God. Mana Cost: 2 White. Converted Mana Cost: 4. Types: Sorcery. Card Text: Destroy all creatures. They can't be regenerated. Expansion. Wrath of God may refer to: Suffering construed as divine retribution · Operation Wrath of God, Israeli covert operation; Titled works: The Wrath of God, a Western .
In regard to the wrath of God let us now contemplate four things: Men try to forget that there is such a thing as Divine wrath. The realization of it makes them uneasy, so they endeavor to banish all thought of it. At times they are terrified at the bare mention of God's wrath, hence their anxiety to dismiss the subject from their minds.
Others try to believe there is no such thing. They argue that God is loving and merciful, and therefore God's Anger is merely a bogey with which to frighten naughty children. But how do we know that God is Loving and Merciful? The heathen do not believe that He is. Nor does Nature clearly and uniformly reveal the fact.
The answer is, we know God to be such, because His Word so affirms. Yes, and the same Bible which tells of God's Mercy speaks of His Wrath, and as a matter of fact, refers more frequently much more so to His anger than it does to His love. The fact of God's Wrath is clearly revealed in the Scriptures. In these, and in other passages too numerous to mention, the fact of the Divine wrath is affirmed.
And now let us consider: Wrath is one of the Divine perfections. If God did not punish evildoers He would be a party to evil doing, He would compromise with wickedness, He would condone sin. Of necessity God is a God of Wrath. Consider an argument from the less to the greater. In the human sphere he who loves purity and chastity and has no wrath against impurity and unchastity is a moral leper. He who pities the poor and defenseless and has no wrath against the oppressor who crushes the weak and slays the defenseless, but loves them too, is a fiend.
Divine wrath is Divine Holiness in activity.
Because God is holy He hates sin, and because He hates sin His anger burns against the sinner. As it is written, "Thou hatest all workers of iniquity" Psalm 5: And again, "God is angry with the. God's wrath is not an abstract quality. God's wrath is not some thing that is inactive and inoperative. During Old Testament times God's wrath was openly displayed against evil-doers, notably at the Flood; in the destruction of Sodom and Gormorrah with fire and brimstone from heaven; on the Egyptians and their haughty king, when He visited their land with plagues, slew their first born and destroyed their armies at the Red Sea; and in His dealings with the Nation of Israel, in selling them into the hands of their enemies, sending them into captivity and destroying their beloved city.
God's wrath against sin was publicly manifested at the Cross, when all His billows and waves passed over the head of the blessed Sin-Bearer, "I am afflicted and ready to die from My youth up: Thy fierce wrath goeth over Me: Thy terrors have cut Me off" Psalm Human wrath is oftentimes an awful thing. Scripture likens the wrath of a king to the roaring of a lion.
When a man's anger gets the better of him and he allows his fury to burst all restraints; it is a fearful thing to behold. Scripture also speaks of the Devil having "great wrath because he knoweth that he hath but a short time" Rev. But what shall be said of the Wrath of God? To what shall we liken it? How indescribably awful must be the unrestrained and unmixed wrath of such a Being!
With what shall we compare the wrath of Him who made the heavens and the earth by the word of His power, who spake and it was done, who commanded and it stood fast! What must the wrath of Him be like who shaketh the earth out of its place and maketh the pillars thereof to tremble! What must the wrath of Him be like who rebuketh the sea and maketh it dry, who removeth the mountains out of their places and overturneth them in His anger! What must the wrath of Him be like whose majesty is so terrible that no fallen man can live in the sight of it, and in whose presence the very seraphim veil their faces!
Scripture speaks of God's wrath "waxing hot" Exod.
The heathen do not believe that He is. It is impossible to flee out of His dominions! Using an agent posing as an Italian journalist, Mossad lured him from his apartment in Paris to allow a demolition team to enter and install a bomb underneath a desk telephone. In order to assassinate them, Operation Spring of Youth was launched as a sub-operation of the larger "Wrath of God" campaign. Three attacks quickly followed the Lebanon operation.
It declares "Great is the wrath of the Lord" 2 Kings It makes mention of "The fierceness and wrath of Almighty God" Rev. It refers to God's wrath coming upon sinners "to the uttermost" I Thess. Everything about God is unique. His power is omnipotent. His wisdom is a great deep. His love is unsearchable. His grace is unfathomable. His holiness is unapproachable. And like all His other perfections and attributes God's wrath is incomparable, incomprehensible, infinite.
It will be the Wrath of the Almighty! And what will the wrath of the Almighty be like when it comes upon sinners "to the uttermost"?
And what power of resistance will poor, frail creatures of the dust have for enduring the full weight of it? It will overwhelm them. It will utterly consume them. It will crush them more easily than we can a worm beneath our feet. It will sink them into the lowest depths of hopeless despair. It will be intolerable and unbearable.
And yet it will have to be endured - consciously endured - endured day and night for ever and ever! May these unspeakably solemn thoughts prepare the unsaved reader for the next division of our text. In view of this terrific fact, "Because there is wrath, beware lest He take thee away with His stroke. Sinners are even now threatened with God's wrath, yea, they are by nature "children of wrath. It is true that the time for the full and final and open manifestation of it has not yet arrived. It is true that sinners often defy God now with apparent impugnity, and because of this the wicked spread themselves like green bay trees.