JERUSALEM — The morning after the Israeli Air Force shot down an unidentified drone in the Negev Desert, the Lebanese government said that four Israeli warplanes spent an hour on Sunday illegally circling in its airspace.
The Israeli Defense Forces refused to confirm or deny the report from the Lebanese Army, which said the planes entered above the village of Kfar Kila at 10:10 a.m. and left above Naqoura an hour later.
Such flyovers are not unusual and prompt regular complaints from to the United Nations, but Sunday’s caused a stir because of the drone shot down the day before, which many in suspect was sent by Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group. No one has claimed responsibility for the drone.
Lt. Col. Avital Leibovich, a spokeswoman for the Israeli military, said Sunday that Israel had tracked the drone for nearly a half-hour before taking it down in an unpopulated area of the Negev in the south, and that investigators had collected all of its parts and were analyzing them in hopes of determining its origin and mission.
“The concern is when you take it to the broader perspective of the arms race in the region,” Colonel Leibovich said. “The drone is part of those efforts.
“It was not armed,” she added. “It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have the capability of carrying arms or explosives.”
In another event on Sunday, an Israeli drone fired a missile at a motorcycle traveling in the southern Gaza Strip, wounding two young men riding it as well as eight passers-by, according to witnesses and health officials.
The Israeli Defense Forces said in a statement that it had targeted Tala’at Halil Muhammad Jarbi, who was born in 1989, and Abdullah Muhammad Hassan Maqawai, who was born in 1988. The military said that Mr. Maqawai is a member of the Ashura Council of the Martyrs of Jerusalem, a Gaza-based Global Jihad affiliate, and that Mr. Jarbi was a Global Jihad operative who had been involved in “extensive terrorist activity” for years, including an attack in June in which an Israeli contractor working on building the fence between Israel and Egypt was killed.
Ashraf al-Qedra, a spokesman for the Health Ministry, said the two men were in critical condition Sunday night, after suffering amputations and burns.
Front Page Features