050507497 does not exist: When Israeli mobile bomb killed The Engineer in 1996

“How are you, father?” were the last words Abdel Latif heard before the mobile number 050507497 went dead. The anxious father redialled the number, but all he got was an automated message saying that it was unavailable. It was January 1996 and those would be the last words of Hamas’s chief bombmaker, the “invincible” Yahya Ayyash. A master of deception, disguise and disappearance, Ayyash was always ahead of Israeli intelligence agencies, even as his bombs rained death on harmless civilians.
Nicknamed ‘The Engineer’, 29-year-old Hamas operative Yahya Ayyash brought deaths to at least 150 people through his bombs. He also became the first casualty of Israel’s cellphone bombing — executed with such precision that the person standing right next to him walked away without a scratch.
Remember, it was 1996, when most of the world hadn’t even heard of a cellphone, forget having touched or used one.
His bomb was used for the first suicide attack in Israel. Such was Ayyash’s cult status that his name attracted people to strap his explosives on their torsos and turn themselves into human bombs.
The enigmatic ‘Engineer’ is still worshipped as a heroic figure in Gaza, even after three decades of his death and has a street named after him.
Yahya Ayyash’s calculated elimination came just two months after the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in November 1995. Rabin’s assassination left Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, red-faced.
Though Rabin was killed by an Israeli extremist right-winger, his assassination came at a time when anti-peace forces, including Hamas, resorted to indiscriminate bombings of buses, buildings, and shops.
Shin Bet was desperate for some gains, and it got a big one.
Israel witnessed dozens of bombings and over a hundred deaths because of Yahya Ayyash and the bombs he engineered.
It wasn’t just that Yahya Ayyash was a difficult target to eliminate, but the spectacularity of the attack became one of the most-studied chapters in Israel’s intelligence successes. It was one of the world’s first mobile bomb blasts, and the most precise at that.
Twenty-six years later, although technology has advanced leaps and bounds, Israeli intelligence, Mossad, has pulled off another “first” — this time using a relic from the past: pagers, a gadget of the ’90s.
In a spectacular covert operation by Israel, thousands of pagers and electronic devices, used by Iran-backed terrorist outfit Hezbollah were detonated across Lebanon in two days. The Israelis didn’t just tactically bug the pagers used by Hezbollah’s fighters, they went to the extent of floating a shell company in Budapest to manufacture and sell them to the outfit.
With this operation, Israel scored goals on five fronts, and got the opening for a big military offensive, which started on Thursday.
Following the series of explosions that provided an opening for a big Israeli offensive, its Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said Israel was “opening a new phase in the war”, set to hit 365 days on October 7.
That, the Israelis are at it again, offers a timely opportunity to revisit the 1996 assassination of Hamas’ chief bombmaker Yahya Ayyash, whom a counterterrorist police officer called, “the definition of danger wrapped in a time bomb”.
Yahya Ayyash, 29, an electrical engineering graduate from the West Bank, was a central figure in Hamas’s numerous high-profile attacks.
He designed and built bombs for at least a dozen bombings, including the infamous Beit Lid massacre, which was the first suicide bombing by the Palestinian Jihad that claimed 22 lives, including 21 Israeli soldiers.
Often facing shortages of TNT and other high explosives in the guarded Palestinian territories, Ayyash resorted to using household items. Using acetone and detergents, he produced a highly explosive “Mother of Satan”, according to Algemeiner Journal, an American-Jewish newspaper.
All went well, until a failed bombing attempt, when three would-be-suicide bombers ran into police with five 12-kg petrol tanks filled to capacity, connected to a detonator. It was in 1992, and Israeli intelligence got to know of the ‘Engineer’s’ identity.
On the radar of Israeli agencies for years, Ayyash began to face the heat in the West Bank and needed some shelter in Gaza. It was in June 1995 that he approached his university friend, Osama Hamad, in Beit Lahiya refugee camp in northern Gaza for accommodation.
In what is something rare among Palesgtinian jihadis, Ayyash was a family man. By 1996, Ayyash was a married man and father to a son.
“By January 1996, with his wife and son safely smuggled into Gaza and living in a safe house a kilometre away, Yehiya Ayyash began to settle into a routine existence, although he was still suspicious and extremely careful,” writes best-selling author Samuel M Katz in his book, The Hunt for the Engineer.
On his discreet and unannounced meetings with his wife from his new safe house, Yehiya Ayyash would dress up as a woman in a burkha. Despite the new-found refuge, Ayyash yearned for his parents.
“If there was one weakness he displayed that winter, even after his wife and son were safe and sound in the [Gaza] Strip, it was his longing for Rafatt [West Bank] and his parents. Ayyash was a prisoner of his longing for his mother and father — and he was concerned about the incessant Shin Bet attention the family received,” writes Samuel M Katz.
And it was this yearning that proved fatal for the ‘Engineer’.
It all started unfolding in the morning of January 5, 1996, when Yahya Ayyash returned to his friend’s home at 4.30 AM, dressed in a burkha with a rifle hidden underneath. He had spent the entire night working on a bombing project.
To speak to his father in the West Bank, Yahya Ayyash mostly used the land phone at his friend’s home. But the line being unreliable those days, he had passed the number, 050507497, to his father.
“Once home, Ayyash prayed, then munched on a light snack at a table adorned with a map of Tel Aviv next to a smaller table topped with electrical tape, wires, pipes, and circuits. Before laying his head on a plush mattress adorned with three large pillows, he checked the table to see if Osama Hamad’s Motorola phone was on,” writes Katz.
Ayyash, unable to locate the phone, eventually drifted off to sleep, though lightly, wary of any unnatural sound.
Not far from where Ayyash was sleeping, a group of Israelis dressed in blue-and-green winter coats armed with field radios, cell phones, black boxes, and binoculars, grew impatient. The hum of a small-engine propeller-driven aircraft could be heard overhead.
The Motorola cellphone that Ayyash was looking for in his half-sleep had been rigged by Shin Beit.
A small, radio-controlled bomb was inserted into that mobile phone. Fifty grams of RDX explosives were moulded into the battery compartment of a mobile.
But the phone needed to be delivered to Yahya Ayyash. For that, Israeli agents needed someone with access to him.
Ayyash’s friend Osama Hamad’s uncle, Kamal Hamad, a building contractor, is said to be that person who collaborated with Israeli intelligence, according to a 1996 report in the UK-based The Independent by Patrick Cockburn.
Kamal gave Osama a mobile phone – the number is now known to be 050-507497 – to keep in touch, reported Cockburn.
Kamal Hamad borrowed the phone from his nephew for a few days and returned to him after it was rigged with explosives.
After the blast, Kamal Hamad vanished and was nowhere to be found. He abandoned his Mercedes and his grand mansion. The Israeli media speculated that in exchange for betraying Ayyash, he was paid $1 million (Rs 3.55 crore in 1996), given a fake passport, and granted a visa to the United States, reported Patrick Cockburn for The Independent.
At around 8.40 am, the Motorola phone, that Ayyash had been looking for, rang.
Osama Hamad handed the phone to Ayyash for him to talk to his father who was calling from the West Bank. Ayyash’s father told him that he had been trying to reach him on the land phone since 8 am but was unable to connect.
“As the two men spoke, the low-flying plane that had been buzzing Beit Lahiya levelled at a cruising altitude… Father and son spoke in brief and affectionate sentences. ‘How are you father?’ was the last words heard at the end of telephone number 050507497,” writes Samuel M Katz.
Then the number became unreachable. ‘The Engineer’ Yahya Ayyash, referred to as ‘Israel’s Osama bin Laden’ by Katz, had been killed.
“Fifty grams of RDX explosives moulded into the battery compartment of a telephone had been designed to kill only the man cradling the phone to his ear. The force of the concentrated blast caused most of the right side of Ayyash’s face to implode around his jaw and skull; shrapnel and energy raced into his brain. A slab of flesh hung over his premolars; a burnt and smoldering nub of flesh had replaced his ear. The booby-trapped cellular phone had been so ingeniously built, and so target specific, that the left side of Ayyash’s face had remained whole. The right hand which held the telephone was neither burnt nor damaged,” writes Katz in The Hunt for the Engineer.
Ayyash had reached a cult status among Palestinians.
“He was a cold-blooded killer, but that didn’t make him unique. But he was a master at deception, disguise, and disappearance. He was everywhere and nowhere. He was a God-like hero to his people and the very mention of his name attracted a flock of men willing to strap his devices to their torsos and turn themselves into human bombs,” writes Katz.
The right hand that survived the blast, turned into a powerful symbol for the Palestinians, a reminder of their beloved ‘Engineer’. A model of the same was also displayed at Yehiya Ayyash’s funeral procession days later.
Like in the case of the pager blasts of 2024 that has spread paranoia among Hezbollah members, Ayyash’s precise and shocking assassination deeply unsettled Palestinians, as it exposed the extent to which Israeli intelligence had penetrated Hamas ranks. The unprecedented use of technology in tracking and eliminating Hamas targets, something not previously employed by Israel to this degree, sent shockwaves through anti-Israeli forces and heightened their caution in years to come.