[ad_1]
But Admiral Hagari said that the drone images did not clearly show a weapon, and that the troops needed to get closer to ensure that the figure was not an Israeli civilian who could have been hiking in the area. As the troops closed in, the person opened fire from a distance of about 200 yards, fatally shooting a third Israeli soldier and wounding a fourth before being killed himself.
His identity and motivation remained unclear on Sunday. The Israeli news media reported that a Quran was found in his bag, suggesting a possible Islamist link, but any affiliation with a militant group was not immediately known.
Among the other questions that remained to be investigated, Admiral Hagari said, was why an emergency gate in the steel fence along the border, through which the suspect entered Israel, had no proper lock but was held closed only by plastic hand restraints; why sensors along the fence did not detect the breach; and how he managed to reach the army position and surprise the soldiers without being spotted by lookouts.
Sometimes, Admiral Hagari said, the systems can be affected by weather conditions.
“The Israeli defenses collapsed yesterday,” Yossi Yehoshua, a military affairs commentator, wrote on Sunday in the Hebrew newspaper Yediot Ahronot. Given that the Israeli military “enjoyed real superiority in terms of manpower, daylight visibility conditions and auxiliary troops,” he wrote, the pursuit should have ended without Israeli casualties.
Other analysts questioned whether troops stationed along the border could be expected to remain alert for 12-hour shifts in the heat of the desert.
The Egyptian Army publicly offered a different version of the event on Saturday, saying in a statement that at dawn on that day, a member of its security forces had breached the security fence while chasing drug smugglers and had exchanged fire that led to the deaths of three Israeli soldiers and the wounding of two others as well as the death of the Egyptian officer himself.
The Egyptian statement did not account for the hours between the smuggling attempt and the shootings that the Israeli military outlined.
[ad_2]
Source link
