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Jerusalem (AFP) – The Israeli army announced on Friday that its air defenses fired at a drone coming from Lebanon that entered Israeli airspace, in the second such incident in two days.
Lebanon’s Hezbollah said in a statement Friday that it had launched the drone on a “reconnaissance” mission over Israel.
The Israeli army said in a statement that “a small hostile drone infiltrated from Lebanon into Israeli territory, where alarms were activated in the Galilee region, prompting residents to seek shelters in northern Israel.”
The army added that “interceptor missiles were fired from the Iron Dome system” at the plane, and “planes and helicopters were called, and after a few minutes, the plane disappeared and the incident is under investigation.”
For its part, Hezbollah announced that it launched a march “inside the occupied Palestinian territories, which toured the targeted area for forty minutes on a reconnaissance mission that extended for seventy kilometers.”
He added in a statement that “the plane + Hassan +” returned “safely after it successfully carried out the required mission”, despite the Israeli army’s attempts to “shoot it”.
This evening, Israeli fighters flew at a very low altitude over Beirut, and residents of the capital could see them clearly, while the sound of their roar was heard throughout the city.
On Thursday, the Israeli army announced that it had “downed a Hezbollah drone that infiltrated Israeli airspace from Lebanon.”
Israeli security sources told AFP in January that the drones, which the Jewish state recently shot down after flying across the border from Lebanon, revealed the growing capabilities of Hezbollah’s aerial reconnaissance.
The Secretary-General of Hezbollah said Wednesday that Israel wants to “prevent us from bringing marches from Iran,” noting that it will not succeed in this. “Today, and this is no secret to the Israelis (…) we have the technological ability to convert our missiles into precision missiles,” he added.
“Today in Lebanon, for a long time, we started to manufacture marches,” he added.
The Israeli army, near the border with Lebanon, has an air command center that includes about twenty officers whose mission is to monitor Hezbollah’s drones.
Lebanon and Israel are officially at war. In 2006, Lebanon witnessed a bloody war between Israel and Hezbollah that lasted for 33 days, during which 1,200 people were killed in Lebanon, most of them civilians, and 160 Israelis, most of them soldiers.
© 2022 AFP