Speaking to Israel Radio on Tuesday, Drucker said that Iron Dome had exceeded the defense establishment's original expectations for the anti-missile system.
He also specifically stated that Iron Dome could be used to protect Sderot from incoming Palestinian rocket attacks.
The Iron Dome missile defense system passed its last tests and the first two batteries will be ready for deployment by November, the Israeli Defense Ministry said Monday. If it proves effective, the system could have far-reaching strategic implications for the Zionist entity’s ongoing battle against resistance groups on the Palestinian borders.
The Iron Dome system uses sophisticated radar to track incoming rockets, intercepting and destroying them far from their targets. It is the only anti-rocket system of its kind in the world, according to experts.
Its aims to protect Israel from homemade and imported rockets fired by Palestinian resistance fighters in Gaza, as well as the more sophisticated rockets in the hands of Hezbollah fighters on border with Lebanon.
The successful tests completed Monday involved destroying multiple incoming targets in coordination with other air force systems, the Israeli Defense Ministry said in a statement.
The ministry said the first two Iron Dome batteries would be deployed by November. Israeli Defense officials said they would be posted near the town of Sderot, near the Gaza border.
Palestinian resistance fighters in Gaza have fired thousands of homemade rockets at border settlements. Israel launched a fierce three-week military campaign in Gaza in December 2008 to try to stop the barrages. During that war, Palestinian fighters also fired longer range Grad missiles that hit Israeli settlements, including Ashkelon and Beersheba and the Israeli military couldn’t stop the rockets nor defeat the Palestinian resistance groups in the Strip.
Israel came under stiff international criticism after the war because of widespread destruction and the death of over 1400 Palestinians, including 420 children and the injury of more than 5300 others.
The Israeli Defense Ministry statement Monday said the Iron Dome system is meant "to protect the state of Israel from short-range rockets and missiles."
Israel expressed concern that if a Palestinian state were created in the West Bank, Israel's main international airport would be in range of Palestinian rockets. An effective anti-rocket system like "Iron Dome" could reduce those concerns.
The Israeli defense officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were going beyond the ministry's statement, said it would take years to deploy enough batteries to protect both borders, because of budget constraints.
In the statement, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak pledged, "We will move toward operational deployment of the batteries in the field as soon as possible."
Development of the "Iron Dome" cost about $200 million. Critics say it would prove too expensive to fire advanced missiles at cheap, primitive rockets.
The only budget ensured for the purchase of batteries, beyond the two existing ones, comes from American military aid. Recently, the Congress and the Obama administration confirmed a special aid package of $250 million to Israel, a sum that is meant to cover the purchase of up to nine Iron Dome batteries.
However, in January Israeli daily Haaretz reported that Iron Dome trial was an impressive technological achievement, however the problem was that the success of Iron Dome does nothing to ease the threat of Qassams on Sderot, or the threat of the short range Katyushas in the hands of Hezbollah.
According to the Israeli daily, Iron Dome has brought nothing new to the table, and it has not solved the inherent problems of a defense system based on missiles trying to intercept enemy rockets. Therefore the rejoicing and the preening in the wake of the test's success hide the far bleaker truth.
Haaretz added, “The public relations campaign accompanying the test is full of deceptions and half-truths. It has ignored the flaws in the systems and has created illusions. This is because Iron Dome will not protect the communities directly surrounding Gaza nor, apparently, locales even further away from the Strip.”
“In likely scenarios of rocket fire on the home front, the stock of Iron Dome missiles is liable to run out way before the rocket barrages end. And in any case, because of the high cost of using Iron Dome for defense, the Palestinians in the south and Hezbollah in the north can defeat us at the bank, without even launching a single rocket,” the report continued.
This truth was discovered in 2008 by Israeli cabinet ministers, who decided to fortify all the locales less than four and a half kilometers away from the Strip. This known fact did not deter the security establishment representatives from deluding the inhabitants of the "Gaza envelope" into thinking that the success of the Iron Dome test means protection for them.
And in February, Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah addressed the "Israeli" public saying the Iron Dome anti-missile shield is closer to a film than it is to an operational fact, and that its efficiency is negligible. “ Israel used to wage wars knowing that its home front was safe. This has ended in the wake of the 2006 war. We have our home front and they have theirs. They bomb us, we bomb them. They kill us, we kill them. This is their strategic weakness today,” his eminence said.
River to Sea
Uprooted Palestinian
Iron wall, a 1923 Jabotinsky in delirium of admiration for the national-fascist "Willen aus Stahl" writes:
ReplyDelete"The first word is iron. They must get iron. They must give everything they have for iron – their silver and wheat, oil and wine and flocks, even their wives and daughters. All for iron! There is nothing in the world more valuable than iron.”
Iron Will, was the boasting attribute the psychopath Ytzak Rabin gave himself in 1967, and went on waging war.
Iron Hand, was the title he gave to his criminal policies in 1975-76, which institutionalized torture in Zionist prisons.
The Iron Arm, was imposed by his successor as Chief of Staff, Raphael Eitan on Palestinians, and it meant a policy of extra-judicial assassinations.
Iron Brain, became the next idea which surfaced in 1982, whose muggy idea was to purge the refugee camps of their inhabitants, by means of terror. Sabra and Chatila massacre is one example illustrating the likes of of the sociopaths murderers Begin and Sharon.
Iron Fist came next, again by psychopath Ytzhak Rabin, together with his buddy mass murderers Shimon Peres then Minister of "defense". This was a the introduction of massive "collective punishment" in the West bank and Gaza.
Then Cast Lead in winter 2008-09, how more sinister can one group be ?
and on and on and on, not surprisingly now they launch an "Iron Dome" over a concentration camp with 1.5 million people they starve to death in the most medieval, prehistoric manner.
Lack of intelligence, lack of creativity, lack of humanity, lack of spine, lack of dignity, lack of civilized backgrounds, lack of compassion... the Judeo-Zionists are synonymous with lies and total regression. They will irremediably be flushed towards the only "piece of real estate" they deserve: a sewage filled abyss, with only one outlet: Downwards.
exilem