The Company commander in charge of the area of the northern Gaza Strip will be court-martialed for the ‘operational error’.
IDF officer from the Southern Command calls the incident a “Yom Kippur for the Northern [Gaza] Brigade.”
An Israel Defense Forces patrol recently discovered a large breach in the security fence between the northern Gaza Strip and Israel. Following the discovery, which could have potentially ended with terrorist cells infiltrating Israel and carrying out attacks, the company commander in charge of the sector will be court-martialed this week.
A high ranking officer told Israel Hayom over the weekend that the incident was a serious security flaw. While no one managed to infiltrate into Israel through the breach, one officer from the IDF’s Southern Command called the incident a “Yom Kippur for the Northern [Gaza] Brigade.”
The discovery of the breach in the Gaza Strip is the second serious operational error in the Northern Brigade in recent weeks. As reported in March by Israel Hayom, on Passover eve a Gazan resident succeeded in infiltrating Israel when motion sensors on the security fence failed to detect his crossing. The remaining rings of security, including observation posts and combat troops on standby, did not spot the infiltrator, who apparently snuck into Israel in search of work. The man reached a hitchhiking stop in the Gaza Strip border community of Netivot, where he turned himself in to Israel Police. The Passover incident could have ended much worse had the man been planning to carry out a terrorist attack. The event prompted a wide-scale investigation and efforts to prevent it from happening again. But the efforts apparently were not stringent enough, as the breach in the Gaza fence shows.
An IDF official said that in the most recent incident it appears no hostile elements succeeded in entering Israeli territory and that the proper steps will be taken following the results of the investigation.
The IDF Spokesperson released a statement saying, “The breach was discovered during operational activity designed to test the functioning of the security fence. The incident was analyzed thoroughly, during which other flaws arose and will be fixed.”
View original Israel Hayom publication at: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=9357