The fire kites terror from the Gaza Strip continued on Wednesday in Kissufim and Be’ery, with firefighters and farmers fighting the raging flames together. Meanwhile, over the past few two weeks, a group of Israeli civilians has been mobilized to employ drones to stop the burning kites that cross the border and land in Israeli agricultural lands in the Gaza vicinity. They have already succeeded in downing hundreds of enemy kites and helium balloons and their work at the border significantly reduced the number of fires. Now the IDF must decide whether to allocate the necessary resources for its continued operations.
This initiative was born by civilians, drone aviation professionals, who persuaded the army to give them an opportunity to fight the new terror weapon coming from Gaza, Channel 2 News reported. At first no one knew how to deal with them, but the results on the ground spoke for themselves – in two weeks they took down more than 350 kites and balloons, and on the days they operate near the fence, the number of fires falls dramatically.
The entire drone team, incidentally, is made up of about ten people.
The work in pairs: one observes and the other flies the drone, and together they say they succeed in hitting the attacking kite 40 seconds from the time of detection.
The rumors about their success are spreading quickly and more drone pilots want to join. The question is whether the IDF HR would allocate reserve duty days to expand this unit which, at the moment, are the only ones who manage to spoil the Gaza terrorists’ efforts to burn agricultural lands alongside the border.
For now, the fires in the Gaza envelope do not stop. To date, hundreds of arsons have been recorded, in which more than 6,200 acres were decimated – about a quarter of the area within range of the Gaza Strip.