WarSclerotic

Halutz on Iran: Israel will know what to do if threatened – Israel News, Ynetnews.

During interview with Alhurra TV network, former IDF chief of staff says, ‘I don’t advise anyone to test Israel’s abilities’; notes Second Lebanon War now appears as great success

Ynet

Iranian aid flotilla cancelled, won’t sail to Gaza – Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News.

Organizers cite ‘Israeli threats’ as the reason for canceling the flotilla; separate Iranian ship heads to Gaza via Caspian Sea.

One of the organizers of an Iranian aid flotilla that was to said to Gaza in efforts to break Israel’s naval blockade on the territory, announced Thursday that the event has been cancelled due to “Israeli threats.”

	Iranian ship heading for Gaza from Bandar-Abbas.

Army Radio reported that a separate Iranian ship, carrying 60 Iranian activists, was being prepared to sail to Gaza via the Caspian Sea. This after the Lebanese media reported several days ago that Egypt has denied Israel’s request to prevent Iranian ships from passing through the Suez Canal toward Egypt.

Meanwhile Thursday, the U.S. State Department issued a statement calling the aid flotillas to Gaza irresponsible.

“Mechanisms exist for the transfer of humanitarian assistance to Gaza by member states and groups that want to do so,” the U.S. State Department said regarding Lebanese plans to ship aid to Gaza. “Direct delivery by sea is neither appropriate nor responsible, and certainly not effective, under the circumstances.”

The Lebanese and Iranian efforts come after a tragic incident aboard a Turkish aid ship, part of an 8-ship Turkish flotilla, which was headed for Gaza on May 31. Israeli navy commandos, intent on preventing the ship from reaching Gaza’s shore, boarded the ship, and were met by a violent mob wielding sticks and knives. The clash that ensued resulted in the deaths of nine Turkish activists.

DEBKA.

President Barack Obama may not be happy about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu‘s new Syrian initiative when it is presented to him on July 6, but he will find it hard to reject.
First, he concedes more Golan land than offered by any former Israeli leader and, second, his initiative draws heavily on a plan which, according to DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s US sources, is dubbed in Washington “the improved Fred Hof initiative” – named for the senior aide to the US Middle East envoy George Mitchell and Obama’s own contact-man with top Syrian officials.
Frederic C. Hof has developed broad personal ties with top Syrian political, military and intelligence ranks. He has come to believe that in time, Syria can be prevailed upon to break away from its close bonds with Iran and Hizballah and that President Bashar Assad‘s requirements for peace can be squared with Israel’s legitimate needs.
The US president holds Hof’s views in very high regard and often heeds his suggestions on how to proceed on Middle East issues.
Netanyahu is therefore certain he is backing a winning horse in the White House and Damascus by adhering closely to Hof’s roadmap for peace with Syria. His challenges on the domestic front are more daunting.
The Golan Heights’s elongated structure, as described in the first two articles, means that there is very little space between Israel’s front line against Syria and the interior.
No more than one to five kilometers separate Israeli Golan villages and its main water sources – the Sea of Galilee and Yarmouk River which are fed from Lebanese springs – from Israel’s border defenses – the Hill Line.
(See full-size map http://www.debka.com/static/images/Golan_Lines.swf)
Shifting the Hill Line even marginally to the west would substantially weaken Israel’s defense capabilities and make it more difficult to mount a successful attack on Syria.
In 1976, the late Yitzhak Rabin became the first Israeli prime minister to inform Washington (Secretary of State Warren Christopher) of his government’s willingness to execute a withdrawal from Golan. Since then, Israeli military strategists have charted two lines of military withdrawal to the west in the event of an interim peace accord being negotiated between Syria and Israel, which Netanyahu intends proposing on July 6.

The Hill Line

Located 3-5 five kilometers west of the present armistice line dividing the Golan between Israel and Syria, the Hill Line starts in the north at Jabal Qata (south of Majdal Shams) and continues southward towards Tel Shiban, Mt. Shifon, Tel Fazra and Givat Bezek. This line does not have much political logic. Syria would gain a very small sliver of land, probably not enough to form the basis of any accord. Its sole advantage would be the transfer to Syrian sovereignty of three of four Druze villages, whose inhabitants never gave up their Syrian citizenship and retained close family and trade ties on the other side of the border.

The Ridge Line

This is the focus of the proposal Netanyahu is carrying to the White House. Between two and five kilometers from the Jordan River, the Ridge Line is the last high-altitude area before the land on the western face of Golan drops steeply down to the Jordan River, the Hula Valley and Sea of Galilee.
An Israeli pullback to the Ridge Line is tantamount to ceding the entire Golan to Syria and dismantling all the settlements established there in 43 years – hugely expensive and political dynamite at home.
Retaining this line is nevertheless a better deal for Israel than a full withdrawal beyond the Jordan River, because of two advantages:
A. Israel would retain control of both banks of the Jordan, a major source of its water supply. A troop presence on the two banks would make it easier to redeploy military strength to the Golan in the event of war.
B. Holding the high Ridge Line would give the Huleh Valley and Sea of Galilee basin military protection against enemy fire (a regular feature of the 1958-1967 years) and place an obstacle in the path of Syrian forces advancing on these lowland areas of northern Israel.

Netanyahu prefers the Syrian track to the Palestinian

The Israeli prime minister will try and convince the US president that the Syrian track is more promising than the badly limping Palestinian talks by showing him how much land he is prepared to give up to Syria, DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s sources note. The Ridge Line offers a much more generous Israeli withdrawal than the Hill Line and therefore is closer to Assad’s maximalist demand for Israel to pull back to a line west of the Jordan, hand over every inch of the Golan and give Syria access to the Sea of Galilee, for good measure.
Netanyahu’s proposal moreover runs parallel to Fred Hof’s improved roadmap (which started life as an idyllic plan for the Golan to be transformed into a nature reserve shared by both countries).
The Hof plan is a roadmap in that it provides for Israel to withdraw to the Ridge Line in two provisional stages:
In Stage One, Israeli troops would pull back from the Hill Line to the central Golan heartland, but retain its cluster of early warning stations and surveillance posts on Mt. Hermon – so as to keep track of the ground from Golan up to Damascus, 40 kilometers away.
Israel would also continue to hold the southern sector of Golan and the moderate gradient sloping from the northeast to the southwest. The southernmost section is a sheer drop down to the Jordan River to the west and the Yarmouk River to the south. Its rocky cliff face cannot be traversed by armored units, as explained above.

The second stage only after the first has held for some years

Stage Two would take place after a specified number of years, when Israel is certain that Syria has abandoned its belligerent intentions and is ready to sign a full peace treaty. Until then, Israel will continue to hold this southern gradient, the east bank of the Jordan River and its early warning and surveillance facilities on Mt. Hermon.
According to our sources, an element of the Hof plan which the Israeli prime minister has not accepted is its inclusion of “small tracts in the Jordan River Valley” for placing on the negotiating table with the Golan. Otherwise, he is prepared to buy the improved Hof roadmap for peace with Syria and fit Israeli policies into its frame.
Any move to quit Golan would be extremely unpopular in Israel. It would require an 80-member majority (of the 120 members of Knesset) to revoke the law passed in 1981 extending Israeli jurisdiction to the territory.
To achieve this Netanyahu would have to reshuffle his cabinet, dropping right-wing factions in favor of left-of-center partners.

DEBKA.

Pantsyr-S1E

In the past two years, Israel has extended its military edge over Syria in many fields. The danger of an incursion by Syrian armored divisions, a very real menace for the 30 years from 1973-2003, has been sharply reduced. This has been achieved by the Hill Line deployment on the Golan – which bristles now with highly sophisticated anti-tank weapons – and the vast improvement since the Second Lebanon War of 2006 of Israel’s aerial and ground resources for knocking out armored combat vehicles including tanks.
Much enhanced too are Israel’s air and naval superiority, whereas the Syrian Air Force’s technical and operational fitness has declined.
To make up for these shortcomings, the Assad regime is investing heavily in updating its air defenses – always a strong point of the Syrian military alignment, even though it never kept pace with the Israeli Air force’s improved responses. Damascus has taken up the Russian offer to speed up deliveries of the latest versions of its anti-aircraft Pantsir-S1 systems, which were only assigned to the Russian army as recently as May of this year.
Each of the vehicles which carry a 90-kg (198 pound) Pantsir-S1 has radar with a 30-kilometer range, two 30mm cannons and 12 Tunguska missiles. The Russian-made missiles have a twenty kilometer flat range and up to 8,400 meters (26,000 feet) against flying targets.

Sharing with Hizballah expands Syrian might and reach

DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s military sources note that Syria deployed these very missiles in late 2007 when Israeli warplanes bombed its plutonium reactor near the northern town of Dar az-Zwar, after commandos seized the North Korean nuclear materials it contained.
Believing their clandestine nuclear facility was well protected, the Syrians were stunned to discover that their Pantsir-S1 radar instruments had missed tracking the incoming Israeli jets. They were forced to conclude that Israel’s electronic warfare systems are capable of disabling Syria’s air defenses and have since set about clipping Israel’s edge in three areas:
Six commando divisions (the seventh division is still being put together) have been established and trained for “close combat.” They are made up of mobile infantry units transported by helicopter, rather than armored combat vehicles, and armed with the most up-to-the-minute weaponry and gear, including huge quantities of sophisticated anti-tank missiles and night-vision devices.
The Lebanese Hizballah, using only some of these resources (supplied by the Syrian army), were able to hold Israeli tanks back from breaching the central sector of southern Lebanon and the Beqaa Valley during the 2006 war.
Syria has gone all out for surface-to-surface missiles. It has acquired in addition to ballistic missiles which can hit any point in Israel from almost anywhere in Syria, a large collection of missiles and rockets with shorter ranges – from dozens of kilometers up to approximately 200.
Tens of thousands of these weapons have been transferred to Hizballah in Lebanon, so incorporating the Shiite militia’s armory into the Syrian missile array.
(See DEBKA-Net-Weekly 447 of May 28: An Unheard-of Number of 800 Scud Missiles Ready to Fire).
Damascus has built up a formidable arsenal of deadly chemical weapons which can be launched by missiles, chemical artillery shells or air force planes.

In a war, Israeli tanks have five days to reach Damascus

By these measures, Syria has substantially ratcheted up its military might.
In the last three years, furthermore, Syria has added Hizballah’s military resources to its own. This process of integration was boosted still further five months ago by the military pact signed in Damascus by President Bashar Assad, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah.
Israel rearranged its Golan forces opposite Syria and units facing Hizballah across the Lebanese border in accordance with the new reality, taking into account that an outbreak of hostilities with Syria would automatically bring its ally Hizballah – and possibly Iran too – into the conflict.
The priorities set by the Israel Defense Forces commanders in any conflict are, first, to defeat Syria before going for Hizballah. From this point of view, Israel’s line of defense on the Golan is a perfect fit because it can be manned by a small number of troops, requires little air cover and can easily be switched over to offensive battle array. The improved Hill Line would leave the Israeli Air Force free to attain command of the skies and bombard Syrian and Hizballah missiles.
Israel’s military planners regard the attainment of air superiority at the onset of combat to be the prerequisite for subsequent effectiveness – both in dealing with Syrian surface-to-surface missile forces and for targeting Syrian infrastructure. Their war mission would be the rapid destruction of Syria’s entire sea, land and air forces for the ultimate objective of bringing Israeli troops and tanks to the gates of Damascus in short order, no more than five days from the start of combat.
Israeli armed forces’ confrontations with Syria and Hizballah would focus on disallowing Syria to use its chemical weapons and blocking Syrian or Hizballah troop incursions into Israel, thereby frustrating their cherished dream of ending a war with the acquisition of chunks of Israeli territory.
(See DEBKA-Net-Weekly 430 of January 22, 2010: Iran-Hizballah Mark out Patches of Northern Israel for Capture).

DEBKA.

In the last issue of DEBKA-Net-Weekly (No. 449 of June 18), we reported exclusively that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was preparing to present President Barak Obama with a new peace initiative for Syria when they meet at the White House, after his aides convinced him that this was the most pressing issue on the US president’s mind.
Those talks have since been scheduled for July 6 and the initiative has been fleshed out as a proposal mapping out the sections of the disputed basalt plateau of Golan Israel is prepared to cede to Syria and under what conditions.
(The attached full-size map http://www.debka.com/static/images/Golan_Lines.swf sketches the situation today and the projected withdrawal lines)

According to the plan developed by Netanyahu, Israel and its army, the IDF will withdraw to the so-called Ridge Line (see attached map) – provided Syrian President Bashar Assad follows the example of the late Anwar Sadat, president of Egypt from1971-1981, who paid a state visit to Jerusalem in November 1977 and offered Israel full peace and his country’s adherence to the Western bloc. Under the peace accord he signed with Israel in 1979, Egypt recovered the entire Sinai Peninsula from Israel and accepted its demilitarization.
To regain Golan, which Syria lost after attacking Israel in 1967, Assad would additionally be required to sever his political and military bonds with Iran and withdraw his political and military support from the terrorist organizations, Hizballah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the fringe groups based in Damascus.
Politically, partial Israeli withdrawal to the Ridge Line would restore to Syria the 1,200 square kilometers of Golan land held by Israel and dismantle nearly all of the Israeli communities established there in 43 years with their 20,000 Jewish dwellers. Tactically, it would leave the Israeli army well placed to swiftly recapture the Golan in any exigency.

The high rocky plateau is a major strategic asset

DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s researchers and staff have prepared a wide-ranging analysis of the disproportionately large geopolitical importance of this small rocky plateau and the strategic options available to Israel and Syria – with accompanying maps as illustrations.
Since 1967, Israel has controlled 1,200 square kilometers of the Golan’s 1,800 kilometers, with only a brief interruption. In 1974, an armistice agreement restored the Golan town of Quneitra to Syria and installed a UN Observer Force – UNDOF between the two armies.
The tiny enclave is enclosed by the Mount Hermon ridge in the north (part of which is in Israeli hands), the Jordan River and Sea of Galilee in the west and the Rakkad and Yarmouk Rivers to the south. Northeast of the Hermon is a chain of inactive volcanic cones whose past eruptions have endowed the territory with its fertile volcanic soil.
Shaped like an elongated egg, the Golan is 62 kilometers long from north to south. At its narrowest point in the north – between Majd al Shams and the Jordan River – it is just 12 kilometers across; its central bulge is 26 kilometers broad, narrowing again toward the south.
The Hermon peak, controlled by Syria, is roughly 2.800 meters high. The highest slope in Israel’s hands, called the “Snow Observatory,” rises to approximately 2,300 meters and houses an early warning station.
From there, the high tableland drops down to the southwest. The northern and central mountains, where most of Israel’s defense lines and army positions are located, are roughly 1,000-1,200 meters high, forming a gradient that dips down and levels out 250 meters above sea level over the Sea of Galilee, dropping sharply from there down to the Jordan River in the West and the Yarmouk River in the south.

The Hill Line is a natural tank barrier

Part of this gradient is composed of the rocky cliffs of The Ridge Line, a formidable barrier to passage in and out of the Golan.
The eastern face of the Golan opposite Syria forms a watershed beginning in the Hermon and descending southward along a nearly continuous ridge-line up to Tel Fares in the central Golan. This second barrier is known to the military as The Hill Line, control of which offers tactical advantages.
From one side, it offers a clear vista of the forty kilometers up to the western outskirts of Damascus; from the other, it commands the soft center of Israeli-held Golan, where most of the Jewish communities are located outside Syria’s line of vision and high trajectory fire.
This Hill Line is a natural barrier against tanks. Any Syrian armored forces trying to recapture the Golan would have to circle around on lower ground under the guns perched overhead.
Between 1948 and 1967, the Golan towered over the Huleh Valley and Sea of Galilee and was a source of Syrian military harassment. Its annexation on December 14, 1981 was seen as vital to securing northern Israel – although this act never won international recognition.
The Israeli prime minister is preparing now to move on and revise that assessment.

DEBKA.

George Papandreou

While Western and Turkish media outlets harped in the last two weeks on Israel’s loss of its only Muslim ally in the Middle East, Jerusalem was busy acquiring a new strategic partner – Greece, another NATO member with plenty of Middle East interests, who was perfectly willing to step into Turkey’s shoes and invest in stronger military and intelligence ties.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s sources in Athens and Jerusalem report that this development was not so much planned in Jerusalem as it was initiated by Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou, who boasts many Jewish and Israeli friends and business contacts, some of whom hold high political and intelligence positions in Israel. He saw a chance for Athens to slot into Ankara’s place in Jerusalem and transform their present diplomatic, economic, military and intelligence ties into a thriving strategic alliance, as advantageous to both sides as were Israel’s former relations with Turkey.
According to some sources, Papandreou expects this alliance to extricate Greece from its financial woes, aside from looking to Israel’s help for speeding up the upgrade of his armed forces and helping transform them into the Christian mainstay of NATO in the Balkans and southern Europe – in place of the Muslim Turkish army.
This notion was not the outcome of Israel’s break with Turkey or the clash aboard the Turkish Mavi Marmara on May 31 between Israeli commandos and pro-Palestinian Turkish activists. It has been evolving for some time, first broached in the summer of 2008 when Papandreou allowed 100 Israeli F-15 and F-16 fighter-bombers to pass through Greek Mediterranean air space for practicing long flights and in-flight fueling.
The distance between Israel and Greece there and back is 1,900 kilometers, identical to the distance between Israel and Iran.

A strategic partner made welcome in Athens

The Greek prime minister went out of his way to be of assistance, making available to the Israeli Air Force the crews and advanced S-300 PMU1interceptor missile batteries Athens purchased from Russia back in 2000. They were allowed to practice bombing sorties against these batteries, in case Moscow decided to sell them to Iran and Syria.
The severe financial crisis besetting Greece this year enhanced the friendly ties between Athens and Jerusalem. While European Union countries spent long months discussing whether to bale Greece out and save it from collapse (eventually granting a €110 billion package), Papandreou turned to Jewish financial titans in Europe and the United States for help to keep the Greek economy afloat.
The new strategic alliance has produced immediate benefits for Israel.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s intelligence sources report the Greek prime minister took upon himself to keep key Mediterranean ports out of bounds to ships en route to confrontations with Israel’s Navy over its blockade of Hamas-ruled Gaza. He made personal appeals to the prime ministers of Lebanon, Cyprus and Malta to prevent those vessels docking and taking on supplies and fuel or departing for Gaza from their ports.
He also worked behind the scenes in Brussels to sell EU leaders on the step negotiated between Quartet envoy former British prime minister Tony Blair and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu for opening the Gaza crossings to civilian goods while keeping the sea blockade in place.
Papandreou’s influence was crucial in obtaining the EU’s tacit acceptance of the deal.
It was also instrumental in persuading Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri who, with his Saudi sponsors has extensive investments in the Greek shipping industry, to confidentially ask Cypriot and Maltese leaders to close their ports to the Gaza-bound vessels.

Turkish generals alarmed by military benefits Israel can confer on Greece

Papandreou’s intercession in the flotilla crisis left Turkish and Iranian ports as the only remaining departure points for Gaza-bound vessels and held up preparations for the next ships to set sail.
But Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan is reluctant for Turkey to stand out as the only country bent on a showdown with Israel and is thinking twice about following up the first flotilla. Even Hizballah is hesitating.
He is already facing angry criticism from large sections of Turkey’s financial, diplomatic, military and intelligence communities over his anti-Israeli stance and total alignment with Tehran and Damascus. And Turkish generals are alarmed by the nascent strategic ties between Jerusalem and Athens, warning their prime minister that the Greek armed forces will benefit from the upgrade of its weapons, standards of combat and technological capabilities and soon outstrip Turkey and be hard to handle.
Erdogan was also alerted by his military and intelligence chiefs to the harm Israeli-Greek intelligence cooperation could wreak to Turkish interests and plans in the Mediterranean, Black Sea and Caucasian regions.
These warnings have given the Turkish prime minister pause, DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s sources in Ankara report. He has suspended some of his overt moves against Israel, but not so far given up on his anti-Israel policies.
For now, he is looking for a way to get around the evolving Greek-Israeli partnership. Our Jerusalem sources, for their part, report this partnership looks set to prosper and generate a spate of joint activities, most of them discreet.

DEBKA.

Ofek 9

The launch of Israel’s Ofek 9 spy satellite from its Palmachim Air Base on the Mediterranean coast Tuesday night, June 22 had two unusual features of especial interest to DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s intelligence sources:

A. The previous six launches of the Ofek series were kept well-hidden from the public and from the prying eyes of foreign intelligence agencies; only when they proved successful were they officially announced and a few photographs released. This time, the Israeli Air Force and Ofek’s manufacturers, Israel Aviation Industries went to great lengths to make it highly visible to Israelis living along the densely-populated coast.
The three-stage ballistic missile boosted the advanced remote-sensing satellite, weighing about 650 pounds (300 kilograms) in such a way that instead of flying west over the Mediterranean, it first flew north, leaving a huge, 150-kilometer trail of fire and smoke in the night sky above all of Israel’s coastal cities. Only when it was over Netanya, did it swing west, gain altitude and go into orbit at a 40 degree angle to the equator. There it began performing its function of upgrading Israel’s intelligence-gathering and monitoring in the entire Middle East, including Iran’s nuclear sites, and the southern hemisphere.
The launch was therefore witnessed by millions of Israelis and West Bank Palestinians before the official announcement was released.
B. DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s intelligence sources report that Ofek 9 was moved up four months before its scheduled launch in the fall of 2010 for five reasons:

Stopping an intelligence breach revealed by the Turkish flotilla

1. Israeli intelligence was found seriously wanting on May 31, when what should have been an uncomplicated commando raid of a Turkish Gaza-bound civilian vessel went badly awry. It ended in an unforeseen battle on deck with nine Turks dead and six Israel soldiers wounded and the most damaging diplomatic fallout Israel had experienced in years.
2. The conclusion reached was that hostile Iranian undercover entities had managed to breach or find a hole in Israel’s intelligence system. This was brought to light by the failure to detect the preparations in Turkey for the blockade-busting flotilla for Gaza. Clearly, Israel intelligence, while maintaining a close eye on Iran, its nuclear facilities and Revolutionary Guard bases, was missing out on other parts of the Middle East.
This oversight enabled Iran, Syria and Hizballah to hide military preparations for attacking Israel in remote and unforeseen locations such as Turkey, keep it unawares and then pounce unexpectedly.
Israel’s pretext that it did not engage in undercover surveillance of “friendly” nations who were NATO members did not wash with Western intelligence experts because, as they all know, even friends often spy on each other
3. The May 31 debacle shocked Israel into the realization that the smallest port or air facility tucked away in the Middle East that were never before of interest to its intelligence services must now be brought under its purview. In Turkey, local informers could not longer be relied upon. A system was vitally needed for obtaining intelligence data by the fastest and most direct route, i.e., by satellite.
Some of these considerations were candidly revealed on Thursday, June 24 by Israeli Knesset Member Maj. Gen. (res.) Yitzhak Ben-Yisrael, who prior to entering political life headed the Israel Defense Forces’ Weapons Development Division and is an authority on missiles and satellites.
He said: “Now, after the launch of Ofek 9, no Middle East country will be able to perform covert operations at moments when our satellites are somewhere else, because there will be no more such moments. We’ll be there at all times. Neither Iran nor any other country will be able to move any type of material without our knowing.”
DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s intelligence sources say that Ben-Yisrael’s comments will be spot on when all Ofek 9’s systems are fully functioning. But this will not happen for another at two to three weeks, i.e., in mid-July.

Ofek 9 shows Tehran Israel does not need air corridors to bomb its nuclear sites

4. The Turkish flotilla episode produced another unpleasant shock: Parts of Middle East air space were abruptly slammed shut to the Israeli Air Force.
On Wednesday, June 16, Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Recep Erdogan convened his Defense Industry Implementation Committee, known as SSIK, for a series of decisions. One was to freeze 16 defense and military agreements signed between Israel and Turkey, including permission for Israeli military jets to use Turkish air space, the sharing of intelligence and cooperation in counterterrorism.
Tehran and Damascus could now breathe easy, rid of their fear of an Israeli air strike coming from the direction of Turkey.
Much encouraged, Tehran and Damascus began leaning on other governments to follow suit, thereby generating a plethora of news reports in the world media about the air corridors Israel needs for its Air Force to attack Iran.
The most prominent was a London Times report on Saturday, June 19, according to which Saudi Arabia had practiced standing down its anti-aircraft systems to allow Israeli warplanes to fly overhead on their way to attack Iran’s nuclear installations through a narrow air corridor left open in the north.
This leak had one purpose, DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s intelligence sources report, and that was to embarrass Riyadh into following in Ankara’s wake and declaring its skies closed to Israel.
It worked like a charm. Before the end of the day, the Saudi princes declared Israeli bombers would never be permitted to cross its airspace to bomb Iran.
Certain, too, that the Obama administration would not let Israeli bomber jets have an air corridor through Iraq, Tehran was patting itself on the back for succeeding by dint of the Turkish flotilla episode in closing off all of Israel’s air routes to Iran.

Israel is now interested in the PKK

For this reason, the launch of Ofek 9, DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s military and intelligence sources report, had to take place now and produce a big bang. It was necessary to show Tehran as graphically as possible that Israel does not need air corridors to attack its nuclear sites, because its launchers and missiles can insert satellites or warheads 400 kilometers into space and from there accurately pinpoint any location in Iran.
Tehran went to extreme lengths to close Middle East skies to Israeli bombers, only to be shown that Israel has the answer: the free use of space.
5. Another of the low-priority areas in which Israeli intelligence, goaded by its break with Turkey, is taking a fresh interest is the triangle in northern Iraq between Turkey and Iran, where the Kurdish PKK rebels maintain bases for their cross-border raids in Turkey.
The Turkish prime minister is using the upsurge in PKK attacks to justify his campaign against Israel, accusing its covert agents of secretly aiding rebel operations against Turkish military targets.
However, Erdogan’s opponents, especially his critics in the Turkish military and intelligence community, accuse him of neglecting the war on the PKK because of his over-preoccupation with slamming Israel.
In these circumstances, the Kurdish rebel movement and its tactics are too important for Israel to ignore. Here, too Ofek 9 has a mission to perform.