Experts who examined footage of the drone being shot down and images of its wreckage released by the Israeli military agreed that the shape strongly resembled that of Iran’s Saeqeh, or “Thunderbolt,” drone, which was based on a CIA-operated RQ-170 captured by Iran.<\/p>\n
[Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, a spokesman for Israel’s military] said that he could not specifically confirm that the drone was a Saeqeh and that the debris is still being examined. Iran has developed several other models based on the RQ-170.<\/p>\n
“It was an Iranian copy of a U.S. drone that they got hold of a few years ago and they duplicated,” [Yuval Steinitz, a minister in Israel’s security cabinet] told Israeli radio. Israel said the drone, operated by Iran from a base inside Syria, traveled three or four miles into its territory Saturday morning before being shot down.<\/p>\n
Iran has described the Israeli claim as “ridiculous.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Iran claims that their version of the stealth drone is armed with four laser-guided bombs, despite experts’ claims that it won’t remain stealthy with armaments. I guess it wasn’t stealthy enough to evade Israel’s detection.<\/p>\n
“It would be a new development if they were flying these around,” Zwijnenburg said. The RQ-170 is designed to evade radar, made of materials that absorb, rather than bounce, the radar signal, but it is possible Iran has not been able to replicate that capability, Zwijnenburg said.<\/p>\n
“They could have been testing air defenses or trying it out,” he said. “If it was trying to evade radar it would have to be flying low, and from the video it looks to be flying low.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Iran is believed to have a dozen of these drones, but that number may be reduced by the Israelis in the coming weeks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Washington Post reports that the Iranian drone that Israel shot down this weekend was actually … Israel shoots down Iran’s counterfeit drone<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":77659,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-77658","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-terror-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77658","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=77658"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77658\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/77659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=77658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=77658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=77658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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