Wrath of God

aka Mivtzah Elohim

Wrath of God was a covert Israeli assassination campaign carried out to avenge the 1972 kidnapping and murder of 11 Israeli athletes by Palestinian militants at the Munich Olympics.

[Page 412]A secret committee chaired by Israeli prime minister Golda Meir and defense minister Moshe Dayan is said to have authorized the assassination of everyone directly or indirectly involved in the Munich killings. The Wrath of God hit squad, made up of members of the Mossad, Israel's secret foreign intelligence service, spent six years tracking down and killing the suspects.

The hit squad first killed Wael Zwaiter, a Palestine Liberation Organization organizer and cousin of Yasir Arafat, shooting him in the lobby of his Rome apartment building in October 1972. Mahmoud Hamshiri was targeted next. After a Wrath of God member, posing as an Italian journalist, scheduled a telephone interview for December 8, 1972, with Hamshiri, members of the Wrath of God broke into his home and planted a bomb in his telephone. Hamshiri was then called at the time arranged for the interview; when he identified himself, the Wrath of God activated the telephone bomb remotely. He died in the explosion.

Four other suspects, Dr. Basil al-Kubasi, Abad al-Chir, Zaid Muchassi, and Mohammed Boudia, were all killed during the next few months. Boudia was killed by a car bomb in Paris, while al-Chir died when a bomb placed under the mattress in his Nicosia hotel room exploded. In 1973, the squad missed one of its targets and mistakenly killed an Arab waiter in Norway. The final Wrath of God killing took place in 1979, when the squad assassinated Ali Hassan Salameh with a car bomb placed along a route he frequented.