Israel Police Commissioner Yaakov Shabtai on Sunday announced plans for the force to join the Magen Directorate and will collaborate with the military and Israel Security Agency in addressing the growing threat posed by civilian drone use.
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Formed in 2018, the Magen Directorate is a national task force headed by the Israeli Air Force with the aim of developing countermeasures to the growing use that terrorist and criminal organizations are making of unmanned aerial vehicles.
Within the framework of the Magen ("shield") program, it was decided that the military will oversee these efforts with respect to Israel's borders and Judea and Samaria, and the police will assume responsibility for the issue within civilian jurisdictions.
Shabtai said the police are treating civilian UAV use as harboring a dual-threat: on the one hand, criminal organizations are increasingly using drones to move drugs, cash, and weapons, and the concern is they could escalate to using them to assassinate rivals; and on the other hand, the terrorist threat – the possibility that a terrorist group could send a suicide drone across any of Israel's borders to crash on a civilian target – is very real.
Police sources said that various options were discussed during a recent Magen Directorate session, including forming a police squadron to intercept drones flown by terrorist and criminal organizations; upgrading the capabilities of the police command and control center to better control incidents involving civilian drone use, and increasing the number of standard positions so as to form special units dedicate to the issue.
It was also decided to bolster ties with other security organizations working in the field in order to review the existing countermeasures and take an active part in the development of new measures that meet police needs.
A senior police source stressed that while there was no specific intelligence pointing to an imminent drone threat, "We already know that criminal organizations are using drones for various purposes like transporting items.
"With regards to terrorism – again, there is no concrete intelligence but there is a history of attempts [by terrorist groups] in Gaza and Lebanon to send drones over the border. These capabilities also exist in Judea and Samaria, and it's an Iranian method used in Saudi Arabia."
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