i24 News:
The less-than-idyllic vistas of the Middle Eastern shores has been part of the operational routine of the outgoing commander of the Navy’s Missile Boats Flotilla (Shayetet 3), Israeli Col. Eyal Harel, and his fighters, over the past three years.
After nine years as a commander at sea, Harel has turned into one of the few officers in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) who got to see how the Middle East changes up close. Over the past few years, he took part in covert and distant operations, which until the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt were the exclusive job of his flotilla’s younger and more prestigious sister, Shayetet 13.
“Today, while going through the Suez Canal with a ship, we have to think about more than one thing. There are a lot of foreign fleets wandering around there, and every wrong move in long-distance mission could be misinterpreted and lead to escalation,” he tells Ynet.
“The scope of our operational activities has gone up dozens of percents, even though the amount of troops dropped when the missile boats INS Nitzachon and INS Atzmaut were decommissioned,” he says.
“And we’ve yet to talk about another mission we now have: Protecting Israel’s commercial waters, a large area at sea which is 12 times the size of Israel and is under threat by (Hezbollah leader) Nasrallah who has one of the most advanced anti-ship cruise missile – Yakhont (P-800 Oniks),” he continues.
Harel is cautious not to say too much about the dozens of operations viewed by Israel as the “battle between the wars” – its efforts to stop enemies like Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas from growing stronger – over which he commanded during the past two years far out at sea, hundreds and thousands of kilometers from Israeli shores.
