RNA - Relying on around 1,000 interviews and thousands of documents, Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations by Israeli investigative journalist Ronen Bergman recounts some 2,700 operations.
The over 600-page book includes assassinations by paramilitary organizations that were operating before the regime proclaimed existence in 1948.
It mostly features Israeli agents taking out Palestinians, but also details their fatal operations against Egyptians, Syrians, Iranians, and others.
The regime has killed many Palestinian leaders, including those with the Gaza Strip-based resistance movement of Hamas.
The book suggests that Israel used radiation poisoning to kill Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader who was the founder of the Fatah movement, investigations into whose murder continue up to date.
Iran says the Israeli regime assassinated four of its nuclear scientists between 2010 and 2012.
Last March, Iran’s envoy to the UN atomic agency Reza Najafi said Israel had hired hitmen to assassinate nuclear scientists all over the Middle East, and yet, it continued to receive nuclear cooperation from certain countries.
“While nuclear scientists across the entire Middle East have been assassinated by Israeli-hired terrorists, the regime’s nuclear experts are allowed access to some countries’ nuclear facilities,” he said, without naming those countries.
The book also shows how Tel Aviv murdered German nuclear scientists working for Egypt in the 1950s and early 1960s, and details the operations targeting Iranian scientists.
Bergman calls the Israeli assassination apparatus “the most robust streamlined assassination machine in history.” He says many of the Israeli techniques were later adopted by the US.
"The command-and-control systems, the war rooms, the methods of information gathering and the technology of the pilotless aircraft, or drones, that now serve the Americans and their allies were all in large part developed in Israel," he writes.
The Israeli spy agency Mossad, the author says, tried to prevent his progress in authoring the work by approaching his subjects and warning them against giving interviews.
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