FALCON POWERS – A senior official in the Israeli occupation army described the Yemeni operation that targeted “Tel Aviv” yesterday as “the Israeli Air Defense’s October 7,” according to the Israeli economic website “Calcalist”.
The official said that Yemen’s success in launching the explosive drone to the center of “Tel Aviv” is a “resounding failure of the air defense system and represents the end of the era of the ‘clean sky’ that Israel has boasted about for several years.”
He reviewed a mix of several circumstances and failures that could explain the penetration of the drone into the Israeli airspace without any prior attempt to intercept it, the first of which is “the existence of a critical gap in concrete intelligence information about such a drone that traveled about 2,000 kilometers without being detected.”
He explained that “the air defense system was supposed to be provided with an early indicator that would enable the deployment of all defensive systems, on the ground and in the air, in an attempt to detect the suspicious target and identify it, and then destroy it using defensive missiles or helicopters or aircraft.”
In addition to the lack of such concrete information, the “Air Force air defense system has other means that were supposed to help detect the approaching threat, such as satellite detection and visual detection and radars,” according to the Israeli official, which represents another failure, according to “Al-Mayadeen.”
He pointed out that the Air Force has “various optical devices, many of which are secret,” which “were supposed to support it in case the other detection devices did not provide the data to classify the target as hostile.”
He noted that the difficulty of obtaining a reliable picture of the sky based on visual means during the operation “may be related to the fact that the attack was carried out at night, which makes it difficult for such systems.”