While enjoying an evening meal overlooking a view of the Mediterranean Sea from his beach front home in August 2008, Syrian Brigadier General Mahmoud Suleiman was killed when two shots fired by a sniper struck him in the head and the throat. Media speculation at the time of the incident suggested that the fatal shots had been fired from a yacht parked nonchalantly off the coast nearby.

The revelation found in papers leaked by US whistleblower Edward Snowden that Israeli Special Forces were behind the assassination of the chief adviser to Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad again underscored the penchant for creativity which has historically been a signature of the Jewish state’s clandestine operations.

On a number of occasions the Shin Bet or Shabak, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency; the Mossad, its foreign security service, and the Israeli army have all used tactics which might be considered innovative and unorthodox.

So using a civilian yacht to get close enough to the Syrian general to accomplish the alleged hit would not be the most elaborate ploy ever used by a team dispatched by Jerusalem. During the 1976 Entebbe Operation, Israeli commandos used a black Mercedes limousine to fool Ugandan soldiers guarding an airport where hostages were being held into thinking that President Idi Amin himself was arriving. The ploy worked allowing for the successful completion of one of the most famous rescue operations of all time in which more than 100 Israelis held in a terminal building at Entebbe Airport were saved.

In another instance four years earlier, a team of Israeli commandos infiltrated the Lebanese capital of Beirut in order to assassinate targets linked to the Munch Massacre – the slaughter of Israel’s Olympic team at the 1972 Games. The commandos appeared to be revelers out for a date, while some, including future Prime Minister Ehud Barak, dressed as women.

Surprise can be key to the success of such operations – either allowing Special Forces enough time to complete their mission while surrounded by overwhelming odds or allowing them to strike an opponent from a direction from which they thought they were safe.

Deceiving the enemy is one method of achieving surprise, Danny Yatom, a retired Israeli army general and a former director of the Mossad, told The Media Line. “We have proved that we can be very creative… due to a lot of experience that we have gathered,” Yatom, who took part in the 1972 Sabena Flight 571 hostage rescue operation, said.

The need for Israel to be inventive is quite clear, Yatom said. “All the time we are few against many; (this has) caused us to be creative.” Israel’s small territorial size and relatively low population has meant that historically, it has had to find ways of ensuring victory, even when outnumbered or out gunned. “We know very well that we do not have the luxury to lose even one war,” Yatom summarized.

But Israel’s ingenuity in the application of military force goes beyond elaborate disguises and methods of gaining access to a target locations. In 1996, Israeli security services assassinated Hamas brigade commander Yahy Ayyash, known as “the Engineer” due to his skill in the construction of explosive devices, using a bomb hidden inside a telephone. Having identified a home Ayyash used as a safe house, Israeli operatives were able to persuade a Palestinian who had access to the building to swap the home’s phone for one that they provided. The new telephone had a listening device within it, the Shabak told the local informer. What they didn’t tell him was that it also contained a small amount of explosives.

Next time Ayyash came to the safe house and used the phone to speak with his father, Israeli operatives listening in identified the Engineer’s voice and triggered the device he was holding next to his ear.

The Israeli government has an ongoing policy of refusing to deny or confirm its involvement in operations that are suspected of involving Israeli intelligence operatives. The exact details surrounding Ayyash’s death were not publically acknowledged until former Shabak chief Carmi Gillon described the state’s involvement in the 2012 documentary, Gatekeepers.

“There is no generic menu as to how to conduct an operation – every case has to be developed independently by its own concept. You can’t have guiding rules,” Dr. Gabi Siboni, a Senior Research Fellow in Military and Strategic Affairs at the Institute for National Security Studies, told The Media Line.

Siboni, who is also a colonel in the army reserves, played down any idea that Israel had a philosophy that led it be creative in the use of military power. Rather, he explained, Israel had learned to be efficient with the use of its limited assets. “Sometimes you have cultural constraints, sometimes you have resource constraints – sometimes a lack of resources helps you sharpen your mind,” he said.

A connection between the idea of the civilian side of Israel as the “start-up nation” and the resourcefulness demonstrated by the country’s military exists, Yatom agreed. The former Mossad chief pointed to the fact that Israel was one of the pioneers of unmanned vehicles, now a mainstay of modern military technologies, and that the country is now leading the field in cyber warfare – believed by many analysts to be the next innovation defining the battlefields of the future.

“We’re not talking about (creativity in) just secret operations. We’re talking about Israeli life in general,” Martin Van Creveld, an Israeli military historian, told The Media Line. Van Creveld argued that it was more than a lack of resources that had taught Israelis to operate this way. “Jews have always been very creative… (because) we’re probably the least disciplined people in the world,” he said. The historian argued that there was a reason that new technologies and innovations were frequently originating in the Jewish state but that the same could not be said of large corporations like Samsung, of which Israel has produced few. “The former takes imagination, the latter discipline,” according to Van Creveld.

“Now that the military is becoming much less important we are putting this (creativity) into the economy,” Van Creveld said. During the early years of Israel’s youth inventive talent was channeled into the construction of the state and the military, Van Creveld explained. Since the country’s move away from socialism in 1985, the economy and technology have been the chief beneficiaries of the country’s creative edge.

Whether it is efficiency in the use of resources or a culture of innovation, it appears that the dynamic which inspires the Mossad and the Shabak is likely to continue. In coming years, it is possible that a number of additional examples of operatives “thinking outside of the box” will come to light.