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Israel Says It Shot Down Iranian Salvo ‘Shoulder-to-Shoulder’ With US
Crews work on an Israeli Air Force F-15 Eagle in a hangar, said to be following an interception mission of an Iranian drone and missile attack on Israel, in this handout image released April 14, 2024. Photo: Israel Defense Forces/Handout via REUTERS
Israel‘s repelling of a massive Iranian drone and missile salvo was fully coordinated with the Pentagon, which had a US operational liaison officer in the control room of the Arrow ballistic air defense system, a senior Israeli official said.
The United States, along with Britain, France, and Jordan, helped Israel intercept the bulk of the weekend barrage and potentially stave off escalation between the regional enemies.
At least half of the hundreds of pilotless one-way planes, cruise missiles, and surface-to-surface missiles, which Israel said carried a total of 60 tons of explosives, were shot down by Israeli warplanes and aerial shields, according to local media.
Israeli officials said much of the work was done by their Arrow 2 and Arrow 3 high-altitude defense systems, which were developed jointly with the Pentagon and Boeing Co.
Arrow’s interceptor missiles cost between $2 million and $3.5 million a piece, according to Israeli industry sources.
Moshe Patel, director of missile defense at Israel‘s Defense Ministry, said Arrow and lower-altitude interceptors were synced with counterpart US systems in the region.
“The systems share information, for a joint picture of the sky, and the sky was certainly busy,” Patel told Channel 12 TV.
“Afterward, there is also coordination in battle doctrine. An American officer sits in the control room of the Arrow weapons system and essentially conducts the coordination with the US systems, shoulder-to-shoulder.”
There was no immediate comment from US Central Command, which oversees Middle East operations. On Sunday, it said US forces destroyed more than 80 of the drones and at least six of the ballistic missiles aimed at Israel.
Israel said 99 percent of all the projectiles were downed in time, limiting the toll to injuries to one person and damage to one military base. That surprised even Zvika Haimovitch, a retired brigadier-general who formerly commanded Israel‘s air defenses.
“[This was] well-synchronized and coordinated between all the elements — the air, the ground forces — and, yes, to be honest it is a great percentage and much more than we expected if you would have asked me three days before,” he told Reuters.
“But we need to be sure that we will be ready for the next time because for sure there’ll be a next time,” he said. “We need to take as an assumption that the Iranians will do their homework next time and will try to challenge our systems. That means we need to be one step before and not after our enemies.”
Daniel Gold, director of weapons development at Israel‘s Defense Ministry, told Channel 12 television that work was already under way on more advanced Arrow models 4 and 5.
Arrow 3 shoots down incoming ballistic weapons above the atmosphere, using a detachable warhead that slams into the target in space.
The Maariv newspaper reported that Arrow 3 downed 110 missiles outside Israeli air space, at a potential cost of up to $385 million. The Israeli military had no immediate comment on that. Asked on Army Radio how much the interceptions had cost Israel, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said he did not know.
Mindful of the need for thrift in the face of foes on several fronts, Israel in 2022 said it was developing a laser-based missile shield to deliver shoot-downs as cheap as $2 each.
“I believe that the laser will be in the next few years one of our main solutions in dealing with a variety of threats — rockets, missiles, drones, UAVs, and more,” Haimovitch said.
The post Israel Says It Shot Down Iranian Salvo ‘Shoulder-to-Shoulder’ With US first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Israel Destroyed Top Secret Iranian Nuclear Weapons Site
FILE PHOTO: The atomic symbol and the Iranian flag are seen in this illustration, July 21, 2022. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
JNS.org – The Israeli airstrikes on Iran last month destroyed a secret nuclear weapons research facility in Parchin, 19 miles southeast of Tehran, Axios reported on Friday.
The clandestine site held sophisticated equipment used for testing explosives needed to detonate nuclear devices, the report read, citing three US officials, one current Israeli official and one former Israeli official.
The Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security acquired high-resolution satellite imagery of the facility, which showed that it was completely destroyed in Israel’s Oct. 26 attack.
Israeli and US intelligence agencies began noticing activity in the Taleghan 2 facility in the Parchin military complex in early 2024, which had been largely inactive since 2003, when the Islamic Republic froze its military nuclear program, according to Axios.
One unnamed US official quoted in the report said: “[The Iranians] conducted scientific activity that could lay the ground for the production of a nuclear weapon. It was a top secret thing. A small part of the Iranian government knew about this, but most of the Iranian government didn’t.”
Although President Joe Biden asked Jerusalem not to target Tehran’s nuclear facilities, the site in Parchin was chosen as a target because it was not part of Iran’s declared nuclear program.
This placed the mullah regime in a position where admitting a hit to the site would expose its efforts to resume activity forbidden by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
Moreover, “The strike was a not so subtle message that the Israelis have significant insight into the Iranian system even when it comes to things that were kept top secret and known to a very small group of people in the Iranian government,” the report cited a US official as saying.
Last week, Rafael Grossi, the director of the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency, visited Iran for the first time since May.
He is expected to meet with his agency’s board of governors in Vienna this week for a vote on a resolution to censure Tehran for its lack of cooperation with the U.N. nuclear watchdog.
Speaking about the tensions between Israel and Iran, Grossi said during a news conference in Tehran on Thursday that the Islamic Republic’s “nuclear installations should not be attacked.”
Earlier in the week, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz suggested that Iran’s nuclear facilities may be targeted.
Iran is “more exposed than ever to strikes on its nuclear facilities. We have the opportunity to achieve our most important goal—to thwart and eliminate the existential threat to the State of Israel,” Katz said.
Israel’s two assaults against Iran’s air defense system this year have left the country vulnerable to future attacks, with all four of Tehran’s Russian-made S-300 surface-to-air missile batteries destroyed, according to U.S. media.
On April 19, Israel took out one of the S-300 systems in response to Tehran’s first-ever direct attack against the Jewish state. On Oct. 26, in response to a second Iranian attack, Israel targeted 20 sites in Iran, destroying the remaining three.
“The majority of Iran’s air defense was taken out,” a senior Israeli official told Fox News.
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Yemen’s Houthis Say They Attacked ‘Vital Target’ in Israel’s Eilat
Houthi-mobilized fighters ride atop a car in Sanaa, Yemen, Sept. 21, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah
Yemen’s Houthi forces attacked “a vital target” in Israel’s Red Sea port city of Eilat with a number of drones, the Iran-aligned group’s military spokesperson Yahya Saree said on Saturday.
The terrorist group has launched dozens of attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea region since November in solidarity with Hamas.
“These operations will not stop until the aggression stops, the siege on the Gaza Strip is lifted, and the aggression on Lebanon stops,” Saree added in a televised speech.
The Houthi attacks have upended global trade by forcing ship owners to reroute vessels away from the vital Suez Canal shortcut, and drawn retaliatory U.S. and British strikes since February.
The post Yemen’s Houthis Say They Attacked ‘Vital Target’ in Israel’s Eilat first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Muslims from ‘Abandon Harris’ Campaign Gutted by Pro-Israel Cabinet Picks
US Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US, Sept. 10, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
JNS.org – Muslim leaders in the United Stated who called for supporting President-elect Donald Trump at the expense of Democrat runner Kamala Harris are deeply disappointed with the former president’s Cabinet nominees, Reuters reported on Thursday.
“It’s like he’s going on Zionist overdrive,” Abandon Harris campaign co-founder Hassan Abdel Salam, a former professor at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, said about Trump’s recently announced picks.
“We were always extremely skeptical. … Obviously we’re still waiting to see where the administration will go, but it does look like our community has been played,” Abdel Salam told Reuters.
Rabiul Chowdhury, a Philadelphia investor who chaired the Abandon Harris campaign in Pennsylvania and co-founded Muslims for Trump, was cited as saying: “Trump won because of us and we’re not happy with his secretary of state pick and others.”
Some political strategists believe that the Muslim vote for Trump, or the renunciation of Harris, helped tilt several swing states such as Michigan in the favor of the Republican candidate.
“It seems like this administration has been packed entirely with neoconservatives and extremely pro-Israel, pro-war people, which is a failure on the side of President Trump, to the pro-peace and anti-war movement,” said Rexhinaldo Nazarko, executive director of the American Muslim Engagement and Empowerment Network.
On Wednesday, Trump named Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) as his choice to be secretary of state.
Rubio is known for his staunch pro-Israel stance, including calling on Jerusalem earlier this year to destroy “every element” of Hamas and dubbing the Gaza-based terrorist organization as “vicious animals.”
Rubio joins a slew of pro-Israel officials Trump has tapped since he won the U.S. election, including former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) as his U.N. ambassador with a seat in the Cabinet.
Blaise Misztal, vice president for policy at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA), told JNS that Trump’s focus so early in the transition process on Israel-related foreign policy picks is a mark of how his second administration will approach the region.
“That, in and of itself, signals that President Trump and his administration are going to take the region, the Middle East, the threats confronting Israel, seriously and take the U.S. friendship with Israel seriously,” Misztal said.
“The people that we’ve seen are known to be tremendously strong friends of Israel, first and foremost, but also very clear-eyed about the threats that the United States and Israel face together in the region.”
Before the election on Nov. 5, Trump promised Arab and Muslim voters he would restore stability in Lebanon and the Middle East, while criticizing the current administration’s regional policies during campaign stops targeting Muslim communities in Michigan.
Trump recently addressed Lebanese Americans, stating, “Your friends and family in Lebanon deserve to live in peace, prosperity and harmony with their neighbors, and this can only happen when there is peace and stability in the Middle East.”
Israel has been at war for more than a year on its southern and northern borders, ever since Hamas led a surprise attack on communities near the Gaza Strip border on Oct. 7, 2023, murdering some 1,200 people and abducting 251 more into the Palestinian enclave. A day later, Hezbollah joined Hamas’s efforts by firing rockets into Israel’s north.
The post Muslims from ‘Abandon Harris’ Campaign Gutted by Pro-Israel Cabinet Picks first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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