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Drone flight shows Israel is vulnerable: Iran military official
A still image taken from Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) video footage shows what they say is a small unidentified aircraft shot down in a mid-air interception after it crossed into southern Israel October 6, 2012.
Credit: Reuters/IDF via Reuters TV
DUBAI |
DUBAI (Reuters) - The incursion by an unmanned aircraft into Israeli airspace at the weekend exposed the weakness of Israeli air defenses, an Iranian military official was quoted as saying on Monday.
The Israeli air force shot down a drone on Saturday after it crossed into southern Israel, the military said, but it remained unclear where the aircraft had come from.
Jamaluddin Aberoumand, deputy coordinator for Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, said the incident indicated that Israel's Iron Dome anti-missile defense system "does not work and lacks the necessary capacity", Fars news agency reported.
The Iron Dome system, jointly funded with the United States, is designed to shoot down short-range guerrilla rockets, not slow-flying aircraft. It intercepted more than 80 percent of the targets it engaged in March when nearly 300 rockets and mortars were fired at southern Israel, the Pentagon said at the time.
The drone was first spotted above the Mediterranean near the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip to the west of Israel, said military spokeswoman Avital Leibovich. An Israeli warplane shot it down above a forest near the occupied West Bank.
Israeli parliament member Miri Regev, a former chief spokesman of the military, wrote on Twitter it was an "Iranian drone launched by Hezbollah", referring to the Lebanese Shi'ite group that fought a war with Israel in 2006.
Israeli defense officials have not confirmed this.
Aberoumand attributed claims the drone was made by Iran to a "psychological operation" by Israel, but did not confirm or deny them. "The Zionist regime (Israel) has many enemies," he added.
On at least one occasion, Iranian-backed Hezbollah has sent a drone into Israeli airspace. And in 2010, an Israeli warplane shot down an apparently unmanned balloon in the Negev near the country's Dimona nuclear reactor.
The Israeli military released a 10-second video clip of what it said was Saturday's mid-air interception, showing a small aircraft just before a missile from a fighter jet destroys it.
Israel has threatened to bomb Iran's nuclear sites if diplomatic efforts fail to stop the nuclear work it believes is aimed at getting weapons capability, a charge Tehran denies.
Iran has responded with threats to attack U.S. military bases in the region and retaliate against Israel if attacked.
(Reporting By Yeganeh Torbati; Editing by Alistair Lyon)
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They make a mockery of justice and of every law known to mankind: the Geneva Conventions on Human Rights, the American Bill of Rights, international law, national law and the laws of Islam, Christianity and Judaism. If innocent families can be summarily killed in cold blood at the press of a computer key by a perpetrator who does not distinguish between the innocent and the guilty but merely liquidates people, at will, they display a barbarity unmatched in human history that has no parallel in the benchmarks of moral, legal and religious behaviour and the ethos of human freedom.
There will be no peace in the world for so long as powerful nuclear-weapon states feel justified in such barbaric behaviour that so insult the creator of mankind. In churches, mosques and synagogues throughout the world, priests and elders should condemn such obscene violence against mankind, and demand that these weapons that kill innocents are banned from use throughout the world.
However, it may already be too late, in which case our children are destined never to know security but to live in a cowardly, new world in which terror comes silently out of the sky to wherever they live, to kill them as they sleep in London, Rome, Paris, New York, Karachi, Tel Aviv, Melbourne or Nairobi.
a confrontation. That is where I defend Israel’s right to attack in kind. Israel has always been enemies to many Countries over history because they were God’s chosen people. In the end though Israel will prevail!!
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