On the first evening of a two-day drill, officers and crews of the Israel Defense Force’s (IDF) Home Front Command (HFC) spotter teams, geared and trained to identify incoming missile fire, are practicing their responses and reactions.

“Our role is to track an incoming missile attack against Israel and direct the troops on the ground to arrive as fast as they can (at the impact site), and handle the threat on the ground,” IDF Cap. (res.) and ops commander Noam Ginzburg told Xinhua from a perch atop a white concrete tower overlooking a major highway.

The tripod-mounted, GPS-synched device is capable of zeroing in on the falling projectile, and, as the operator follows its path, fires an infrared laser beam at any two points on its arc. From that, internal programming extrapolates the full path, and calculates where the projectile will hit.

Ginzburg shoulders the responsibility of protecting a swath of densely-populated, target-rich coastal area stretching from Sderot to Ashdod and its strategic port several kilometers to the north.

“They should be able to arrive at the affected area within a minute to a minute and a half,” Ginzburg said of the ground units prepped with hazmat gear.

On Thursday, according to an army source, the teams will drill reactions to hits by non-conventional warheads, including chemical weapons.

Down below the tower, soldiers fired a series of red flares several hundred meters into the air in different directions, in order to simulate a rocket’s fiery exhaust and give the spotters’ gear something to sight on.

From the 2006 war against Lebanon’s Hezbollah to the 2009 Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, the HFC learned the hard way that the ability to accurately and immediately identify the precise spot a rocket hits is crucial for winning a battle.

“The problem is,” deputy commander, Cap. (res.) Amit Sabag said, “the moment you have hits in urban areas, besides the IDF’s updates, the police and municipal emergency forces get hundreds of calls from residents saying ‘the rocket hit here, the rocket hit there,’ and this can mislead you.” 

news@theasian.asia