The head of the Israeli Air Force revealed on Tuesday that Iranian forces fired significantly more rockets at military positions on the Golan Heights in an attack earlier this month than the army had previously claimed.
According to Maj. Gen. Amikam Norkin, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ al-Quds Force launched 32 rockets at Israeli bases on May 10, not 20 as the army had initially said.
Though the air force chief amended the number of rockets fired, he maintained that the result of the Iranian attack was the same as previously reported: Four of the rockets were intercepted by the Iron Dome missile defense system, while the rest fell short of the border and landed in Syria.
The Lebanese Hezbollah terror group, a close ally of both Iran and Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, said last week that Israel had lied about the extent of the Iranian attack.
“Israel said that only 20 rockets were fired, some of which were downed, but the truth is that 55 rockets some of which were of heavy caliber were fired at a number of military posts, creating huge explosions that forced all residents in the Golan and some in northern Israel to scramble to bomb shelters in panic,” said the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, according to Naharnet.
In response to the IRGC attack, Israel conducted dozens of raids against Iranian targets in Syria, hitting approximately 50 positions.
During Israel’s reprisal raid, Assad regime air defenses fired more than 100 surface-to-air missiles at the Israeli fighter jets, Norkin said, speaking at an event for visiting air force chiefs.
Israel retaliated by destroying at least four varieties of Syrian air defense systems, both older Soviet-era models and state-of-the-art Russian platforms, according to the IDF.
Dozens of senior officers from militaries around the world arrived in Israel this week for a three-day conference organized by the air force, the largest such event held in Israel in at least 20 years, a senior IAF official told reporters on Monday.
The focus of the event is “air superiority as a bridge to regional stability,” the air force officer said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
More than 20 countries were sending representatives, either the heads of their air forces or their deputies, including the United States, the United Kingdom, France, India, Vietnam, Poland, Romania, Canada, Finland, Brazil, Holland, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Italy, Greece, Belgium and Austria.
The air force refused to provide a full list of attendees, likely as a courtesy to countries that preferred not to flaunt their military ties to Israel, notably Arab- and Muslim-majority nations.
Israeli Air Force commander Amikam Norkin revealed on Tuesday that the F-35 fighter jet conducted airstrikes on at least two occasions, which he said made Israel the first country to use the American-made stealth aircraft operationally.
“The Adir aircraft are already operational and flying missions. We are the first in the world to carry out operational strikes with the F-35,” Norkin told a conference of air force chiefs visiting Israel from around the world, using Israel’s name for the aircraft.
“The Israeli Air Force has twice carried out strikes with the F-35, on two different fronts,” he said.
Norkin did not specify when those two attacks took place, but said the F-35 did not carry out strikes during Israel’s massive bombardment of Iranian targets in Syria on May 10.
The air force chief revealed the F-35’s operational uses while showing the visiting air force officers a photograph of the stealth fighter jet flying over the Lebanese capital of Beirut, in what could be seen as a tacit threat to the Lebanon-based Hezbollah terror group.
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