Telegraph screenshot
Iranian missiles did far more damage to key Israeli military installations than previously known, according to a Telegraph investigative report. Military censorship prohibited Israeli media from reporting on the successful strikes.
Among the targets hit were Glilot Junction, home of Unit 8200 and the Tel Nof, an airbase housing the IAF F-15 fleet. Camp Tziporit is also the main base for the IDF Merkava tank units:
The new data were shared with The Telegraph by US academics at Oregon State University, who specialise in using satellite radar data to detect bomb damage in war zones.
It suggests five previously unreported military facilities were hit by six Iranian missiles in the north, south and centre of Israel, including a major air base, an intelligence gathering centre and a logistics base.
Based on information in the Telegraph story, the US fired multiple THADD anti-missile interceptors downing Iranian ballistic projectiles at a cost of $400 million.
The costs to Israel in military expenditures, business and property losses exceed $12-billion. While overall economic impact of the Gaza war will cost $400-billion over the next decade. Military expenditures during the war are $100-billion (so far). As a comparison, the annual IDF budget is roughly $20-billion. In addition, the US has provided almost $20-billion in weapons shipments to Israel.
Israel’s so-called victory
The IDF has revealed that it failed to intercept 16% of the Iranian warheads it targeted. Considering that the IAF only degraded approximately half of the country’s launchers and missile arsenal (an Iranian commander says that number is even lower at 25-30%), a renewal of hostilities would undoubtedly lead to considerably more devestation. This contradicts Israeli and foreign media reporting which claim Iran’s capabilities were decimated and remain ineffective. But even the IDF contradicts this claim:
…An Israeli military official said: “Iran had approximately 2,000 to 2,500 ballistic missiles at the beginning of this conflict. However, they were rapidly moving toward a mass-production strategy, which could see their missile stockpile grow to 8,000 or even 20,000 missiles in the next few years.”.
Israel and its willing media collaborators are dead wrong to project a decisive victory over Iran. It has not been defeated. Like the Palestinians, it cannot be defeated. Not by any army. But that won’t stop it from trying…and failing–again and again.
The goal of military censorship was to buttress a narrative of absolute success of the Israeli attack on Iran. The only references to Israeli losses were public, visible structures which could not be hidden. The effect of the secrecy was to hide from the Israeli public the price the nation paid for the recklessness of its leader, Benjamin Netanyahu.
Raviv Drucker, Israel’s leading investigative journalist stretched censorship conditions by revealing as much as he could get away with:
Raviv Drucker of Channel 13, one of the country’s best-known journalists, said last week: “There were a lot of [Iranian] missile hits in IDF bases, in strategic sites that we still don’t report about to this day… It created a situation where people don’t realise how precise the Iranians were and how much damage they caused in many places”.
US builds and funds Israel’s military bases
Returning to the background of the the critical IDF facilities damaged: a 2012 Washington Post report said that the Tel Nof facilities were built by the US Army Corps of Engineers and funded through the annual $4-billion US aid package. Walter Pincus writes:
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers plans to supervise construction of a five-story underground facility…at an Israeli Air Force base near Tel Aviv.
Expected to take more than two years to build, at a cost of up to $100 million, the facility is to have…a laboratory, shock-resistant doors, protection from non-ionizing radiation and very tight security…
Site 911 is the latest in a long history of military construction projects the United States has undertaken for the IDF under the U.S. Foreign Military Sales program. The 1998 Wye River Memorandum…has led to about $500 million in U.S. construction of military facilities for the Israeli…
Three bases were built to support 20,000 troops, and eventually the Israeli air force moved into the same area, creating Nevatim air base. A new runway, 2.5 miles long, was built there by the Corps along with about 100 new buildings and 10 miles of roads.
Over the years, the Corps has built underground hangers for Israeli fighter-bombers, facilities for handling nuclear weapons (though Israel does not admit having such weapons), command centers, training bases, intelligence facilities and simulators…
The Corps also built a new base for Israeli conventional and nuclear weapons (Arrow 3 anti-missile and Jericho ICBMs) as Sdot Micha, as I reported back in 2010.
The US has new plans to spend $1.5-billion more building new IDF capabilities:
[It] covers the construction of new facilities at various military bases, including clinics, naval piers, headquarters for different units and ammunition storage sites. It also involves upgrades to existing infrastructure [and] runway renovations.
According to documents and presentations from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the initiative comprises roughly 20 separate projects with a combined price tag of $1.5 billion.
It also includes a new headquarters for the navy’s elite commando unit, Shayetet 13. It was responsible for the murderers of 10 Turkish activists on the Mavi Marmara in 2010. It also attacked and/or sabotaged several other Gaza flotilla ships seeking to break the Israeli siege.
Perhaps the most costly of the projects is a new support facility for the Boeing refueling tankers necessary for warplanes headed to attack Iran and their return flight: “…It will accommodate the Air Force’s future refueling aircraft, the Boeing KC-46 Pegasus, and the CH-53K heavy-lift helicopters.” The King Stallion helicopters will be stationed at Tel Nof, the site mentioned above, which was struck by an Iranian ballistic missile. A model for this project is pictured (right).
The US supplies the missiles and intelligence to assassinate Iranian generals, and murder entire families in Gaza. We join Israel to drop our 30,000 lb bunker-buster bombs on Iranian nuclear complexes (to limited effect, despite hoopla to the contrary). Now we even build Israel the infrastructure needed to maintain its Pax Judeana. Our leaders either feign impotence to stop the madness (Biden, Harris) or revel in it (Trump). Either way, we are not only accomplices, we are active, willing partners in these obscene crimes.
We wear the moral stain. Like the Children of Israel in the story of the Exodus, the doorposts of our houses are stained with blood; with the blood of a different sort of sacrificial lamb. The hundreds of thousands of innocent lambs of Gaza and Tehran. Victims of Israeli–and our own–cruelty and mass murder.
I really liked this phrase: “Either way, we are not only accomplices, we are active, willing partners in these obscene crimes.”
These crimes against humanity are really obscene.
How did it get this far?
I just watched an old interview from 1963 with Edward Teller and Günter Gaus (link to youtube.com).
Teller believed that technological progress and cooperation between democratic countries would bring not only the power but also the moral level to persuade totalitarian governments to cooperate in a kind of world government.
He hoped this would happen within the next 20 years. More than 50 years later, our democracies are now practicing these obscene crimes.
That is why I am a multipolarist. If necessary, it will take a mullah regime, or a scurrilous North Korean dictator, to avoid ending up under the world domination of such morally depraved democracies.
I don’t blame democracy per se, but rather capitalism. This 12-day war was probably stopped for materialistic reasons rather than moral considerations.
“The costs to Israel in military expenditures, business and property losses exceed $400-billion.” 400-billion sounds exaggerated.
@Royi: that number related to the cost of the Gaza war to Israel. Cost of the war is less, but still substantial. I’ve edited accordingly. Thanks for catching that.
Bibi’s only strategy is to stay out of jail and please Benzion and Ze’ev Zabotinsky. Trump the useful idiot.
The two terrorist ”states” in the world think they have won something but never explain that Iran only became the enemy due to trying to nationalise their vast reserves of oil so the US started Iran on the way to nuclear power and nuclear diodes for medicine, Iran does not want and never has wanted nuclear weapons.
The idea that the combined might of the US and Israel who can’t defeat the Palestinians for 80 years will be able to defeat and control a nation of 93 million people on a land mass of 1.7 million square kilometers is sheer hubris.
When Iran did the Israel drone strike that Israel and the US considered a failure they should have listened when Iran stated they had mapped all the armed bases and military centres. Now I am 72 and have watched the US at ”war” bombing Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and dozens more they have never won.
Pretty much mirrors my life’s story 🙂 … b. ’45