Heads To Roll At Mossad After Earthquake Hits Italy Instead Of Ramallah

Operation Re’ida was intended to sow further instability in Palestinian-administered territories by crippling Ramallah’s infrastructure.

Tel Aviv, October 30 – Officials at Israel’s intelligence and clandestine operations agency promised a full inquiry today after the device intended to inflict an earthquake on the de facto Palestinian capital city instead hit Rome.

A 6.6-magnitude tremor struck the Italian capital this morning after a technician input faulty data into the Mossad’s earthquake generator. Mossad chief Tamir Pardo called an emergency session of all department heads and odered an immediate halt to all operations involving the device until an investigation determines what allowed such a mishap to occur. Even before the first reported casualties from the quake emerged Sunday morning, Pardo convened all department heads and deputies to the session to coordinate the investigation and implement whatever measures may be necessary to prevent a recurrence, including possible disciplinary action against, or dsimissal of, anyone proven negligent in the fiasco.

Operation Re’ida was intended to sow further instability in Palestinian-administered territories by crippling Ramallah’s infrastructure and preoccupying the city’s rescue and maintenance workers for weeks, if not months, while Israel then moved to consolidate its hold on the area. According to preliminary indicators, however, a technician operating the earthquake device, which carries the code name Korach, mistakenly allowed the software to autocomplete the initial “R” of “Ramallah” to read “Rome,” and the machine proceeded to affect the tectonic movements on the Italian peninsula instead of the Judean Mountains. As a result, at least eighteen current Mossad operations have been suspended as the agency reviews its oversight procedures and revamps them.

“There should have been another layer of review before the go-ahead was given to the machine,” explained a department head who spoke on condition of anonymity. “That safety mechanism itself was put in place after a previous mess-up, when a landslide hit the Pacific Northwest of the US instead of China back in 2014. There’s going to be hell to pay if this is the same problem.” A landslide in April of that year killed 18 people and injured many more, and prompted a rare apology from the International Zionist Conspiracy to the people of Washington State.

Agency personnel remained in suspense over the possible postponement or outright cancellation of numerous operations with tremendous implications for logistics, not to mention global events. “I’m going to have to tell my suppliers to put several large orders on hold for an indefinite period, and that’s going to be awkward,” lamented a section head. “We were supposed to go live with a bunch of cataclysmic tsunamis in the Persian Gulf and Malaysia next month, but our warehouses can’t handle all those components for the horde of super-size, remote-control, mechanical moles our system uses, certainly not for months at a time, but some have been shipped already. This is going to be a serious issue.”