Israel works with Arab allies to shoot down drones, a sign of growing ties

TEL AVIV, Israel – In the skies east of Israel, minutes before 2 am, four Israeli pilots scanned the horizon looking for two drones bound for Israel from Iran.

Suddenly, the pilots saw them: two triangular drones, each about 7.3 meters wide, headed west.

“Positive identification,” one pilot told his commanders on the radio.

“I want to shoot.”

Seconds later, both Iranian drones crashed to the ground, shot down by two Israeli warplanes in two places over Arab territory.

The secret episode, which took place on March 15, 2021, was one of the first successful examples of a nascent military relationship between Israel, some Arab partners and the United States, a project that the president Joe Biden he is looking to consolidate into a more formal network during his visit to the Middle East this week.

The incident, corroborated by two senior Israeli officials and the pilots’ communications tapes, exemplifies how Israel, once isolated in the Middle East due to Arab solidarity with Palestinians, is now working closely with various Arab armies.

He also illustrated how Iran’s shared fears have now outweighed the concerns of some Arab governments over the failure to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Over the past decade, Iran and its delegates in Yemen, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq have increasingly used drones to attack Israel, US forces in the Middle East, and Sunni Arab states, including oil installations in the UAE and Arabia. Saudi. this year.

While Iran’s biggest long-term threat is its nuclear program, Tehran’s opponents are concerned about drones because their small size and relatively slow speed make them difficult to detect and interceptand why they are already causing damage.

Announced last month by Israel, the new initiative, the draft Middle East air defenseit is an attempt to strengthen the region’s defenses against drones.

The idea is to allow its participants to instantly alert each other to incoming drone strikes, through the coordination of a central US command.

Israel has already warned some Arab countries of an impending drone strike, a senior Israeli defense official said.

In the future, Israel hopes that participants will be connected to the same radar system, eliminating the need to send each other alarms.

“Everyone will see the same broadcast on their screen,” said Brigadier General Ran Kochav, a senior Israeli army spokesman and former Israeli air defense commander.

Part of the coordination is already taking place.

In the March episode, Israel was able to successfully apply for permission from a neighboring Arab country to enter its airspace and intercept drones before they crossed Israeli borders.

Israeli officials refused to name that country to avoid embarrassing it for allowing another air force to operate on its sovereign territory.

But it probably is Jordanthe only friendly country on Israel’s eastern border.

This secret highlights how efforts to create a more formal network are still in an interim phase.

Israeli officials expect Biden to make his formal announcement on the project during his visit this week.

But the Arab participants are reluctant to confirm its participation, not to mention to announce its participation in a real military alliance with Israel.

“There is a cooperation agreement and it is here to stay,” said Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, a Gulf policy and diplomacy expert based in Dubai.

“But it is a long way from becoming a unified system.”

Bilateral military coordination between Israel, Bahrain and the UAE, and perhaps even Saudi Arabia, which currently has no formal ties to Israel, is feasible, Abdulla said.

But “I think no one is in the mood for a regional alliance“, He added.

However, the fact that such a concept is under discussion highlights the dividend resulting from three diplomatic agreements with which Israel has signed Bahrain, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates in 2020, with the support of the Trump administration.

Fueled in part by mutual anxiety about Iran, the deals have allowed those countries to significantly increase trade and investment.

They also encouraged Egypt and Jordan, which established relations with Israel decades ago but never properly cemented them, to work more closely with their neighbor.

But the most surprising result was the growing military relationship between the new partners.

The Israeli Ministry of Defense has signed public agreements with its counterparts in Bahrain and Morocco, making it easier for the three countries to coordinate and share military equipment.

In a move that would have been unthinkable three years ago,

Israel has established a military link in Bahrain as part of a separate regional initiative to combat piracy.

The Israeli and Bahraini navies trained together in the Persian Gulf in November, along with the US Navy.

The Emirati aviation chief also participated in an Israeli military exercise in October and Israeli officials hope that the Emirates will eventually be able to participate in an annual air drill in Israel alongside various Western air forces.

Of these growing military ties, officials and analysts say the antidrone project it is the most concrete so far and is animated by a real desire for better coordination.

While Israel’s new Arab partners don’t see the Iranian nuclear program as a dire threat as Israel, they are all concerned about drones, said Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin, a retired senior aviation officer and former head of the intelligence of the Israeli army.

“A NATO in the Middle East doesn’t make much sense,” Yadlin said.

“We don’t think the Israelis will fight the Saudis in Yemen and we don’t think the Emirates will fight Israel in Gaza.”

But a joint limited-range drone defense system “represents the regional needs and requirements of all parties,” he added.

Iran started using drones about a decade ago, spending large sums of money to design and build its own models instead of buying them from China, said Alon Unger, a former Israeli aviation drone operator who runs a convention. annual report on drones in Israel.

Drones are very useful for Iran.

They can carry weapons cause damage directlythey can be used for surveillance and can also carry small payloads, delivering things like weapons and explosives to Iranian delegates who would otherwise be out of Tehran’s reach.

In 2019, an Iranian drone launched from Syria, an Iranian ally, was shot down over Israel, just north of the occupied West Bank.

Investigators later discovered he was carrying a batch of explosives which, according to Israeli officials, were intended for Palestinian militants in the West Bank.

Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia in Lebanon, fired three drones at Israeli gas platforms in an area of ​​the eastern Mediterranean claimed by Lebanon this month.

Israeli officials said the drones, which were quickly intercepted, carried no weapons of any kind and were launched only to demonstrate that Hezbollah is capable of reaching a point considered strategic and sensitive.

Iranian drones present Israel with a new technological challenge.

The Israeli defense establishment has sophisticated air defense mechanisms capable of intercepting enemy rockets in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria.

Israel also has a complex sensor system that can detect the tunnels that Palestinian and Lebanese militants sometimes dig under Israeli borders.

But those defenses are relatively inefficient against the drone.

A drone is “a relatively slow aircraft with a low radar profile,” Unger said.

“It is difficult to identify their launch or course, or to shoot them down using fast warplanes, which were built to engage enemy fighters in aerial combat.”

An Iranian drone strike on Aramco, the Saudi national oil company, in September 2019 heightened the sense of alarm over the growing drone threat, not only in Israel, but also in the United States and across the Sunni Arab world. .

This helped galvanize US and Israeli efforts to create a regional cooperation program against drones.

Contact and cooperation already existed at a small and clandestine level between Israel and some Arab countries, officials say.

But the sealing of historic diplomatic rapprochements in 2020, collectively known as the Agreements of Abrahamit has allowed for deeper military relations that have gradually gone public in recent months.

These stronger ties have already allowed Israeli air forces to train in the skies over friendly Arab countries, two Israeli officials said, a game changer for a force previously limited to Israel’s confined and congested airspace.

And over time, Israel hopes that the benefits of such an alliance will make its Arab partners more open on your participation

“Necessity is the mother of invention,” Yadlin said.

And, he added, “the operational need of all partners is to have a better defense”.

Ronen Bergman reported from Tel Aviv, Israel, and Patrick Kingsley from Jerusalem.

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