عربي English Türkçe اردو فارسى
Logo
Latest News
World

US Purchases Iron Dome Batteries from Israel

Streaks of light are seen as Israel's Iron Dome anti-missile system intercepts rockets launched from the Gaza Strip towards Israel, as seen from Ashkelon, Israel, last April (Reuters)
Streaks of light are seen as Israel's Iron Dome anti-missile system intercepts rockets launched from the Gaza Strip towards Israel, as seen from Ashkelon, Israel, last April (Reuters)
TT
TT

US Purchases Iron Dome Batteries from Israel

Streaks of light are seen as Israel's Iron Dome anti-missile system intercepts rockets launched from the Gaza Strip towards Israel, as seen from Ashkelon, Israel, last April (Reuters)
Streaks of light are seen as Israel's Iron Dome anti-missile system intercepts rockets launched from the Gaza Strip towards Israel, as seen from Ashkelon, Israel, last April (Reuters)

The US Marine Corps announced Saturday it is planning to purchase three batteries of Israel's Iron Dome air defense system, in a deal that could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

The deal allows the Israeli developers of air defense systems, score another commercial achievement after the US government approved the sale of an Israeli air defense system, the Arrow-3, to Germany at approximately $3.5 billion.

Any Iron Dome sale, which is a joint Israeli-American project, must be approved by both countries before a deal with a third party.

According to Walla website, it is assumed that the new deal will include about 2,000 Tamir anti-missiles and 44 launchers, as well as control systems. The contract will be signed directly with the American corporation Raytheon, a partner of the Rafael state defense concern in the production of the Iron Dome and David’s Sling.

A significant part of the weapons will be produced in the United States, and not at the Rafael enterprises in Israel.

This is the second time the US buys Iron Dome systems from Israel. It had bought two Iron Dome batteries from Israel for $340 million.

But the acquisition of the Israeli system, which was largely the result of pressure from pro-Israeli lawmakers, faced a central problem. Rafael refused to provide the US military with Iron Dome’s source code, hampering the Americans’ ability to integrate the system into their air defenses.

Under the new deal, the Marine Corps plans to use Iron Dome to protect its troops from cruise missiles, drones, rockets and artillery attacks.

In June, the Marine Corps announced it had conducted two successful live-fire tests of the Tamir missiles and said it was satisfied with the Iron Dome capacities to hit cruise missiles and other targets.

The Iron Dome system was developed by Rafael and the Ministry of Defense to protect Israeli Army bases and settlements from rocket attacks fired from Gaza.

In 2011, the Iron Dome scored its first interception of a missile fired at Ashkelon. To date, the system has completed more than 2,400 operational interceptions, with a success rate of more than 90 percent.

Most Viewed

 
 
World

Jean-Marie Le Pen, Founder of France's Post-war Far Right, Dies Aged 96

French Far-Right Front National founder Jean-Marie Le Pen speaks to journalists during a news conference on the sidelines of the National Front political party summer university in Marseille, France, September 5, 2013. REUTERS/Jean-Paul Pelissier/File Photo
French Far-Right Front National founder Jean-Marie Le Pen speaks to journalists during a news conference on the sidelines of the National Front political party summer university in Marseille, France, September 5, 2013. REUTERS/Jean-Paul Pelissier/File Photo
TT
TT

Jean-Marie Le Pen, Founder of France's Post-war Far Right, Dies Aged 96

French Far-Right Front National founder Jean-Marie Le Pen speaks to journalists during a news conference on the sidelines of the National Front political party summer university in Marseille, France, September 5, 2013. REUTERS/Jean-Paul Pelissier/File Photo
French Far-Right Front National founder Jean-Marie Le Pen speaks to journalists during a news conference on the sidelines of the National Front political party summer university in Marseille, France, September 5, 2013. REUTERS/Jean-Paul Pelissier/File Photo

Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of France's far-right National Front party who tapped into blue-collar anger over immigration and globalisation and revelled in minimising the Holocaust, died on Tuesday aged 96.
His death was confirmed by his daughter Marine Le Pen's political party, National Rally (Rassemblement National).
Jean-Marie Le Pen spent his life fighting - as a soldier in France's colonial wars, as a founder in 1972 of the National Front, for which he contested five presidential elections, or in feuds with his daughters and ex-wife, often conducted publicly.

Controversy was Le Pen's constant companion: his multiple convictions for inciting racial hatred and condoning war crimes dogged the National Front, according to Reuters.
His declaration that the Nazi gas chambers were "merely a detail" of World War Two history and that the Nazi occupation of France was "not especially inhumane" were for many people repulsive.
"If you take a book of a thousand pages on World War Two, in which 50 million people died, the concentration camps occupy two pages and the gas chambers ten or 15 lines, and that's what one calls a detail," Le Pen said in the late 1990s, doubling down on earlier remarks.
Those comments provoked outrage, including in France, where police had rounded up thousands of Jews who were deported to the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz.
Commenting on Le Pen's death, President Emmanuel Macron said: "A historic figure of the far right, he played a role in the public life of our country for nearly seventy years, which is now a matter for history to judge."
Le Pen helped reset the parameters of French politics in a career spanning 40 years that, harnessing discontent over immigration and job security, in some ways heralded Donald Trump's rise to the White House.
He reached a presidential election run-off in 2002 but lost by a landslide to Jacques Chirac. Voters backed a mainstream conservative rather than bring the far right to power for the first time since Nazi collaborators ruled in the 1940s.
Le Pen was the scourge of the European Union, which he saw as a supranational project usurping the powers of nation states, tapping the kind of resentment felt by many Britons who later voted to leave the EU.
Marine Le Pen learned of her father's death during a layover in Kenya as she returned from the French overseas territory of Mayotte.
Born in Brittany in 1928, Jean-Marie Le Pen studied law in Paris in the early 1950s and had a reputation for rarely spending a night out on the town without a brawl. He joined the Foreign Legion as a paratrooper fighting in Indochina in 1953.
Le Pen campaigned to keep Algeria French, as an elected member of France's parliament and a soldier in the then French-run territory. He publicly justified the use of torture but denied using such practices himself.
After years on the periphery of French politics, his fortunes changed in 1977 when a millionaire backer bequeathed him a mansion outside Paris and 30 million francs, around 5 million euros ($5.2 million) in today's money.
The helped Le Pen further his political ambitions, despite being shunned by traditional parties.
"Lots of enemies, few friends and honor aplenty," he told a website linked to the far-right. He wrote in his memoir: "No regrets."
In 2011, Le Pen was succeeded as party chief by daughter Marine, who campaigned to shed the party's enduring image as antisemitic and rebrand it as a defender of the working class.
She has reached - and lost - two presidential election run-offs. Opinion polls make her the frontrunner in the next presidential election, due in 2027.
The rebranding did not sit well with her father, whose inflammatory statements and sniping forced her to expel him from the party.
Jean-Marie Le Pen described as a "betrayal" his daughter's decision to change the party's name in 2018 to National Rally, and said she should marry to lose her family name.
Their relationship remained difficult but he had warm words for her when Macron defeated her in 2022: "She did all she could, she did very well."