Eyes in the Sky: How IDF drones played a key role in Jenin operation

Battalion 636 located terrorists in Jenin before operation, warned troops in real time about their approach, and eliminated some directly.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

A drone battalion in Central Command revealed the crucial role its soldiers played in last week’s Operation Home and Garden in Jenin that destroyed a good portion of the terrorist infrastructure, In an exclusive interview with Walla News Friday.

Battalion 636 commander Lt. Col. G. told the Hebrew language news site that while his drone units take part in “every operation” in the region that the IDF conducts, including being the eyes in the sky for specialized forces on complex, pinpoint arrest raids, this was the largest number of fighters they had to protect at once, as a thousand men went into Jenin for almost two days.

The refugee camp which is part of the city of Jenin is a small but very dense area, he said. “You don’t know where the gunman will come from, from which alley, or aperture of a house, and open fire on the soldiers. That’s why I told my soldiers, emphasize the issue of [looking for] the [terrorist’s] rifle barrel, we have the ability to see it even during the day. We did everything to prevent harm to the soldiers.”

The battalion, which fields four kinds of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), did not only search for potential attackers and warn the ground troops what was happening in real time so they could avoid enemy fire. Some drones, the commander said, “also launched tear gas and stun grenades” to disperse rioters. Others dropped more lethal payloads.

The battalion’s work started well ahead of the operation, he said. For a week before the commandos entered Jenin, his drones followed terrorists’ comings and goings, noting what houses they used as bases, seeing where they placed booby traps, and reporting their locations so they could be destroyed early on in the raid.

“We expanded our preparations to work around the clock. Whole days in a row. Because of the challenge of the alleys and the density of the buildings, the extent of the forces, the duration of the operation, we knew it would not take 24 hours. There were targets inside the camp that we had to follow for very long hours,” he said.

Lt. Col. G. was very proud of his squadrons, who worked so well under new circumstances, as the use of UAVs in such a scope and at such speed, to identify and end immediate threats to life by sending in attack drones “were something we did not know in Judea and Samaria.”

“If you are not sharp – the gunman runs away,” he explained. “He enters a house or an alley. You have lost him. In fields or an open area, you have more time.”

Another very complicated and vital task was to keep an eye on all the different aircraft in the tiny aerial region where the action was taking place – combat helicopters, UAVs, drones of all kinds – allowing each to work without getting in the way of the other, or even crashing into each other. Captain Z., who was in charge of this aspect of the operation, said the number of aircraft in the sky numbered in the “three digits and I can’t go into detail. We handle[d] each one of them with tweezers.”

Not a single drone crashed during the operation, and the extraction of the single critically wounded commando, St. Sgt David Yehuda Yitzhak, who later died, was successful even though Capt. Z. called the evacuation “very difficult.”

“How do you enable a quick evacuation and not harm the [ongoing military] activity?” he said. “In other words, how do we land a helicopter in an area saturated with swarms of drones.”

Battalion 636 worked like “a well-oiled system,” Lt. Col. G. summarized. “We had armed men, disturbances, IEDs and barricades that we identified while moving. The space itself? Was booby-trapped and ready for war from their point of view. We knew it. We have learned from previous operations.”

His squadrons were also the last to leave the scene, he noted, “because as soon as all the [ground] forces left – so did the armed men from the bunkers. We saw them leaving the [Jenin] hospital. We stayed for two hours after the forces left to try to incriminate [terrorists] and upload the [new] information to the systems,” referring to the target bank the IDF constantly updates of terrorist locations.

A hospital, for example, is a civilian center that by international law cannot be used as a military site. Having terrorists operate from one turns it into a legitimate target, albeit one that the IDF would be loathe to attack even in pinpoint fashion due to the automatic condemnation it would receive for doing so.

“When the armed men left the hospital, we had to be very sharp to ‘move’ the data point,” Lt. Col. G. said. “It sounds simple but it’s very complicated, it requires experience.”

Israeli dronesJeninOperation Home and Garden