Operation Wrath of God

After Palestinian gunmen of the Black September group killed eleven Israeli athletes and coaches at the Munich Olympics in September 1972, Prime Minister Golda Meir's government authorized Mossad to hunt down those it held responsible. The first target, Wael Zwaiter, a PLO representative, was shot in Rome in October 1972. Over the following years agents killed Mahmoud Hamshari in Paris with a bomb hidden in his telephone, and others in Cyprus, Athens and Paris. In April 1973 Israeli commandos raided Beirut and killed three senior PLO figures in their homes.¹

The campaign's worst failure came on July 21, 1973, in the Norwegian town of Lillehammer, where a Mossad team shot dead Ahmed Bouchikhi, a Moroccan waiter it had mistaken for Ali Hassan Salameh, a Black September leader. Norwegian police arrested six members of the team, and five were convicted, exposing the operation. Salameh himself was killed by a car bomb in Beirut in January 1979. Historians debate how many of those killed had any role in Munich, and Israel paid compensation to Bouchikhi's family in 1996 without formally admitting responsibility.²¹