Coverage by the Israeli media of the assassination of a Hamas militant suggests the hallmarks of the spy agency, writes MARK WEISSin Jerusalem
THE ONLY response from Israeli officials to last month’s assassination of Hamas militant Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai was “no comment”.
Other killings attributed to Mossad hit-squads in the past, both in the Middle East and elsewhere, have met with a similar non-committal response from Israeli leaders.
But despite the wall of silence, the reporting of the Dubai assassination in the Israeli media leaves no doubt that the killing had all the hallmarks of a typical Mossad operation.
The photographs of the 11 suspects released by the Dubai police, even though they all held European passports, were published in Israeli papers with captions such as “Do you recognise these people?”
Israel’s biggest-selling daily newspaper, Yediot Aharonot, in a commentary titled “They Looked like Itzik from the Kibbutz”, asked “Did anyone wake up in the morning, look at the pictures of the 11 assassins and think to themselves: ‘Hey, I know him. Isn’t that the neighbour from the building next door?’”
The newspaper Yisrael Hayom remarked how remarkably unremarkable the assassins looked.
“It’s true that they had foreign passports and went by names such as Gail and Kevin, but you tell me: is it possible that even one of us isn’t going to be standing on line at the bank or sitting on a train today, only to look at the person next to him and wonder whether he isn’t that fellow from the picture, the one who killed Mahmoud al-Mabhuh in Dubai?”
Yesterday, a British-born man living near Jerusalem, with the same rare name as one of the six suspects listed by Dubai police as a British passport-holder, denied any involvement in the affair.
Melvyn Adam Mildiner, who denied ever visiting Dubai, said he keeps his British passport in his house.
Israeli hit-squads have used non-Israeli passports in the past.
In 1997, Mossad agents who tried to assassinate Hamas leader Khaled Meshal in Jordan entered the country on Canadian passports.
One of the agents had a passport bearing the name of a Canadian living in Israel, who later said he was the victim of identity theft.
In 2005, two suspected Mossad agents were sentenced to six months in jail by an Auckland court after being found guilty of trying to illegally obtain a New Zealand passport.
Despite the professionalism of the Dubai operation, and what the Ha’aretz newspaper described as “Mossad methods” used to kill the Hamas leader, two problems were nevertheless highlighted in the Israeli media.
First, the 11 suspects are now “burned” and cannot be used in future covert operations.
Never in the past has an assassination linked to the Israeli spy agency ended with the pictures of the suspects splashed over the front pages of newspapers worldwide.
In the era of closed-circuit cameras, the clean assassination in which no traces are left may be over for good.
Spy agencies such as the Mossad are thought to have only a few hundred members.
To have 11 top operatives “burned” after a single operation would represent a significant blow to a small, tightly knit organisation that invests huge amounts of time and money on training cadets before they are sent on missions abroad.
The second problem highlighted in the Israeli media was the arrest of two Palestinians involved in the operation.
Hamas and the Palestinian Authority have blamed each other, and the political affiliation of the two men is still unclear.
However, Israeli security experts speculated that, even if they are connected to the killing, it is unlikely the two Palestinians have information that would identify the perpetrators.