4 soldiers killed in drone strike named, as families ask why there was no warning siren
Funerals begin for victims, all aged 19, as questions abound over lack of alert ahead of attack on training base; Gallant says lessons must be learned; 40 soldiers still hospitalized
The Israel Defense Forces announced the names of the four soldiers killed in a Hezbollah drone attack on a Golani training base near Binyamina in north-central Israel on Sunday night, while questions abounded as to why sirens failed to sound ahead of the strike.
The fallen soldiers were named as:
- Sgt. Omri Tamari, 19, from Mazkeret Batya.
- Sgt. Yosef Hieb, 19, from Tuba Zangariya.
- Sgt. Yoav Agmon, 19, from Binyamina-Giv’at Ada.
- Sgt. Alon Amitay, 19, from Ramot Naftali.
Funerals for the fallen soldiers were set to be held on Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning. All four were in combat training and were promoted to the rank of sergeant posthumously.
A further 58 soldiers were wounded in the attack, with 40 still hospitalized on Monday morning. An official investigation found that the explosive-laden drone hit the base while soldiers were eating dinner.
In claiming the attack, Hezbollah touted what it said was its ability to overwhelm Israeli air defenses even as the military forges ahead with its ground operation against the terror group in south Lebanon.
The terror group claimed to have launched “swarms of drones” at Israel, including models that it said were used for the first time.
“They managed to penetrate the air defense and reached the target,” Hezbollah said in a statement, vowing, “We will defend the land of Lebanon. This is only part of what will await the enemy if he continues to attack our people.”
According to the initial investigation of the drone strike, Hezbollah launched two drones that entered Israeli airspace from the sea. They were Mirsad drones, known in Iran as the Ababil-T, Hezbollah’s main suicide drone.
The Alma Center, an Israeli research institute focused on security challenges in the north, said that the drone has “a 120-kilometer assault range, a top speed of 370 kilometers per hour, the capacity to carry up to 40 kilograms of explosives, and the ability to fly at altitudes of up to 3,000 meters.”
Both were tracked by Israeli radars, and one was shot down off the coast north of Haifa. Sirens sounded in the western Galilee area.
IAF planes and helicopters pursued the second, but it dropped off the radar and Israeli forces lost track of it, likely because it flew very close to the ground. No siren sounded because the assumption was that it had crashed or been intercepted once it disappeared.
The father of one of the wounded soldiers questioned why sirens failed to sound ahead of the drone impact.
“I don’t understand why we didn’t activate all the warning systems to prevent this disaster. There were dozens of young soldiers in the dining hall who were eating dinner. The sirens weren’t activated. The UAV penetrated the dining hall ceiling and exploded,” the father was quoted by the Ynet news site as saying.
“I hope that my son and the other wounded soldiers will also recover psychologically; they saw grave scenes of their friends wounded and bleeding, crying for help, and they wanted to help.”
Ynet reported that three soldiers were killed by the impact on the spot, while the fourth was evacuated in critical condition and later succumbed to his wounds.
An IDF soldier who witnessed the Sunday drone strike told Ynet that he had just finished eating and was on his way to return his dinner tray at the moment of the impact.
“Then there was a crazy boom. The iron door buckled, we didn’t understand what was happening and then suddenly something penetrated the ceiling in the dining hall,” he said. “We heard nothing, just the massive explosion. There was no siren.”
He said that the soldiers were starting to run for shelter when they realized that there were casualties, and rushed to bring medical supplies to treat their fellow soldiers.
Another soldier serving at the Golani base told the Haaretz daily that he heard a “strange buzzing above him” before the drone struck the dining hall.
He noted that while some soldiers were still eating at the time of the attack, “it could have ended in an even greater disaster if the UAV had hit a little earlier” when the majority of the troops were in the dining hall.
Another parent of an injured troop told Ynet that her son had been sitting at the same table as three of the four soldiers who were killed in the attack.
“The UAV hit their table, right in the middle of the dining hall. He went to help one of his friends who was injured and then realized that he was bleeding from the head himself,” the woman named Galit was quoted as saying, speaking at Hadera’s Hillel Yaffe hospital where her son was receiving medical treatment.
“They’d come in to eat late, after a training day. What a disaster in the dining hall,” she said.
Visiting the training base on Monday morning, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant vowed that Israel would learn the lessons from the previous night’s strike.
“This is a difficult event with painful results,” he said to Golani officers who were present at the strike. “We must investigate it, study the details and assimilate the lessons in a quick and professional manner.”
“Faced with the threat of UAVs, we are concentrating a national effort and are engaged in developing solutions that will help deal with the threat,” he declared while surveying the damage to the dining hall.
IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi also visited the site on Monday morning, praising troops for how they handled the attack.
“We are at war and an attack on a training base in the rear is serious with painful results,” said Halevi. “You acted properly in treating and evacuating the wounded and the victims.”
“We continue to fight and train for upcoming [battles],” he added.
In a statement a short while after the attack, IDF spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said that the circumstances surrounding the incident were being examined.
In a similar incident in July, a military probe found that a Houthi drone launched from Yemen that killed a man when it exploded in Tel Aviv was tracked by the Israeli Air Force for at least six minutes before the attack, but was not identified as a threat. As a result, no sirens sounded before the attack.
On Friday evening, the beginning of Yom Kippur, sirens sounded in Herzliya shortly before a retirement home was hit by a drone from Lebanon. There were no injuries in that attack.