Senior official: Iran behind rocket fire
JPost ^
Posted on 03/03/2008 4:43:29 PM CST by maquiladora
Rockets continued to hit Ashkelon and the western Negev after the IDF ground operations in the Gaza Strip were concluded early Monday morning. As the defense establishment began to analyze the recent days of fighting, intelligence officers pointed an accusatory finger toward Teheran.
Iranian technology and intelligence was used by Palestinian gunmen in the Gaza Strip in the recent round of violence, said a senior official in Military Intelligence during a Monday meeting of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.
“Iran’s influence and effect is very clear,” said the official.
Terrorists fired at least 20 Iranian-assembled Grad-type rockets, which are significantly more damaging than the Kassam rockets that have been fired at Sderot and the western Negev for the past seven years, said the official.
Military Intelligence was concerned that while the IDF was confronting the ongoing rocket attacks from the Gaza Strip, a new attack on Israel could be launched in the North, said the official.
“Hizbullah is weighing the situation and preparing its forces. In return we must prepare our forces,” said the official.
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Another funny.
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Palestinians call drones a deadly weapon
By IBRAHIM BARZAK and ARON HELLER, Associated Press Writers 43 minutes ago
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip - Palestinians say they know when an Israeli drone is in the air: Cell phones stop working, TV reception falters and they can hear a distant buzzing. They also know what’s likely to come next — a devastating explosion on the ground.
Palestinians say Israel’s pilotless planes have been a major weapon in its latest offensive in Gaza, which has killed nearly 120 people since last week.
“Our experience is that the drone missile is successful in hitting its targets, and it’s deadly,” said Dr. Mahmoud Assali, a Palestinian physician who works in the emergency room of a northern Gaza Strip hospital that has often treated Palestinian gunmen hit by Israeli drones.
“The drone has a zone of around 15 meters (50 feet) where it decimates everything. It targets people and leaves them in pieces,” Assali said.
Israel is at the forefront of the drone technology that is increasingly being used in hotspots around the world. The unmanned craft provide a deadly and cost-effective alternative for armies to target enemies, without risking their own pilots’ lives and reducing civilian casualties in heavily populated areas.
The unmanned craft are guided by remote control from the ground. Because of their small size and relatively low speed, their low-yield missiles can be aimed precisely.
The use of drones is shrouded in secrecy, and Israeli defense officials refuse to comment publicly on whether they are being used in airstrikes in Gaza. However, Israeli officers in private conversations have confirmed use of the weapons.
Wary Gaza militants using binoculars are on constant lookout for drones. When one is sighted overhead, the militants report via walkie-talkie to their comrades, warning them to turn off their cell phones and remove the batteries for fear the Israeli technology will trace their whereabouts.
A militant from the southern Gaza Strip who belongs to the Islamic Jihad group said drones were mostly used to target individuals, and not structures. He said they often hovered at much higher altitudes than manned aircraft and their missiles were frequently more destructive, leaving deep gashes where they landed.
The militant said the drones usually targeted slow-moving targets, like people walking, or cars slowing down to avoid potholes in a road.
“It looks like it makes small circles in the sky, but before it’s about to fire a missile, it slows down,” the militant said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he feared being identified by Israel. “It’s not like any other plane. You don’t see the missile leaving, it’s very quiet.”
Damian Kemp, an aviation desk editor at Jane’s Defence Weekly, said Israel is probably the first country in the world to use unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, for both surveillance and to fire missiles. Israel is a world leader in the field and “capable of doing everything from the very small to the very large,” he said.
He said drones were likely more accurate, cost-effective and safer than manned F-16 fighter jets and Apache helicopters.
“The key thing in a UAV is it does missions that are dull, dirty and dangerous,” Kemp said. “They can be up there for a long time and in areas where you don’t need to put a pilot at risk.”
Jaber Wishah, deputy director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, said his group has received reports about drones firing missiles for more than three years.
“The kind of missile — from the shrapnel we’ve gathered — appears to be small,” Wishah said. “But do we have documentation, photographs of a drone? We don’t.”
Israel has long been considered the world leader in drone technology and proudly exhibits its products at international air shows. But it maintains its drones are for surveillance purposes, and refuses to confirm using them in airstrikes.
Doron Suslik, a top official at the Israel Aerospace Industries, which manufactures drones, said the company has customers from all over the world, including Switzerland, France and India, with annual sales of $500 million to $600 million.
He refused to divulge the drone’s military capabilities, citing his clients’ desire for confidentiality. Government and army officials also refused to comment on the drone’s firing capabilities.
Israel has used unmanned aircraft since the early 1970s, and its fleet has steadily increased. Air force officials say drones have become such an integral part of Israel’s air power that their flight hours now outnumber those of manned fighter planes.
Last March, Israel unveiled its largest unmanned aircraft to date at a seaside air force base in central Israel. The Heron, with a 54-foot wingspan, can fly for up to 30 hours at a speed of 140 mph and a height of 30,000 feet.
Kemp of Jane’s Defence Weekly, said a newer version, the Heron TP, was unveiled in June in Paris. With a wingspan of 85 feet, it can fly for as long as 36 hours and carry a maximum payload of 2,200 pounds.
The U.S. Army has used drones such as the MQ-1 Predator and the MQ-9 Reaper for airstrikes against al-Qaida commanders and other militants in Afghanistan and Iraq. U.S. drones have also reportedly killed militants in Pakistan and Yemen.
U.S.-made Predators are a common sight in the skies of Baghdad, equipped with cameras, sensors and radar that can capture video and still images.
The U.S. Air Force operates a fleet of roughly 100 Predators. The CIA also uses the aircraft and was closely involved in its development. It provides almost real-time, full-motion video and is remotely piloted — Air Force pilots control and operate the aircraft in Iraq and Afghanistan from Creech Air Force Base near Las Vegas.
The Reaper is four times heavier than the Predator, can fly twice as fast and twice as high.
In January, a missile fired from a Predator killed Abu Laith al-Libi, a top al-Qaida commander, in Pakistan’s lawless tribal region of north Waziristan. Coalition forces in Afghanistan are believed to have launched a number of missile strikes from drones against Taliban and al-Qaida militants hiding on the Pakistani side of the border, but the U.S. military has never confirmed them.
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AP writer Aron Heller reported from Jerusalem. AP writer Diaa Hadid in Jerusalem also contributed to this report.
and another.
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For almost 200 million Arabic speakers from Indiana to Indonesia, the IDF has one face and name - 25-year-old Avichay Adraee. The lone member of the IDF’s Spokesman’s Office Arabic Language desk has had his hands full over the past week, presenting the army’s perspective on Kassam rockets and IDF operations in Gaza to the variegated world of Arabic-language media.
“The narrative that Hamas wanted to present was one surrounding the children, with images of children fleeing, and burned bodies of children and so on,” said Adraee, who said that the most difficult question that he was asked in recent days was whether the IDF had changed its strategy to specifically target children.
“You try to say that children are a red line, whether they’re in Sderot or Beit Hanun, and that the difference is that there is an organization [Hamas] that puts children on the front line, and intentionally acts from civilian areas,” explained Adraee. “And ultimately, there were comments made by Palestinians within Gaza that inadvertently helped make this point.”
Adraee recalled one instance in which the director of a Gaza hospital was being interviewed in recent days, and was asked if he could tell the difference between “freedom fighters” and civilians when they are brought in after being wounded. The doctor said no - explaining that “the freedom fighters are forced to blend in with the population,” which Adraee said only helped to strengthen the IDF’s point.
Adraee is quick to emphasize that it is a mistake to view the Arabic-language media as monolithic, even on a rallying point like IDF operations in the Gaza Strip.
“There are media outlets that are much more pragmatic, and didn’t go all the way with the Hamas, even asking very hard questions of the other side,” he said. “Al-Jazeera were very, very militant, whereas Al-Arabiya was quite informative. They demonstrated that they knew the great force of press in the Arab world and didn’t want to use it to inflame the region.
“Not everybody is Al-Jazeera. The pornography of death is not necessarily part of the Arabic consensus - and they understand that it doesn’t always contribute to the situation in the region.”
In some cases, Adraee tried to present the situation as a simple battle between a state and terrorists, an analogy that speaks to moderate Muslims in predominately secular countries like Tunisia and Morocco that are also plagued by Islamist terror groups.
“There is today an understanding that is anti-Hamas,” explained Adraee, “and they understand the concept of the axis of evil.”
The most widely-distributed Arabic-language newspaper in the world, A-Sharq al-Awsat, was also not entirely convinced by what Adraee described as the Hamas narrative of suffering and victimhood. The popular London-based paper ran two opinion pieces attacking Hamas, saying that it was giving Israel an excuse to attack, and that the rocket fire ultimately harmed Palestinian civilians.
At times, said Adraee - who describes himself as having had “a bug” for Arabic ever since his father forced him into intensive study of the language in high school - his efforts hinge on a simple turn of phrase.
One such incident occurred when he was surprised to find himself live on a BBC Arabic-language radio program facing off against a senior Hamas spokesman. “He offered the usual narrative, and then I responded, using an Arabic expression that says ‘you hit me and then you began to cry’ to describe the situation in which we have faced seven years of rocket fire.”
After that comment, Adraee said, he received e-mails and messages on Facebook from Arabic speakers congratulating him on his quick and witty response. At another point, he asked if Hamas wouldn’t serve its people better by using the pipe components of Kassam rockets to improve Beit Hanun’s sewer system. Seven Palestinians were killed in 2007 after the northern Gaza city’s sewers exploded due to faulty infrastructure.
It is this feedback that makes Adraee’s unique task rewarding. “I’m not trying to open a branch of the Zionist movement in Beirut, but if I’ve managed to convince one person at the other end of the world, then I see that as a great achievement.”
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