Soldier killed in Golan minefield accident

A soldier was killed when a land mine exploded on the Golan Heights Tuesday afternoon.

It was not immediately clear what caused the mine to detonate. The Israel Defense Forces was investigating what it said was an unprecedented accident.

Private Roi Alphi, 19, from Gan Yavne, who was in training in the Combat Engineering Corps, was clearing anti-tank mines in the southern Golan, near the small town of Yonatan.

A senior source in the engineering corps said the mine was Israeli, in a field that dated from the 1990s, and had been discovered earlier in the day, uncovered and marked.

The soldier did not step on the mine, which in any case was meant to require more than the weight of a person to detonate, but he was very close to it when it exploded, IDF sources said. It was of a kind designed to explode if an armored vehicle went over it.

The family of the soldier was informed of his death. Two other soldiers were very lightly injured in the blast.

Initial investigation showed the soldiers to have been properly trained for the work, and to have been equipped with all appropriate protective gear. Work in the minefield has been halted while the investigation continues.

The mine contained 10 kg. of explosives, military sources said. It was supposed to have required a weight of over 140 kg. to detonate. Some reports said the mines in the field were not of a type that could be cleared by robots.

Fatalities among soldiers on training courses are rare, but not unheard of. In 2012, one soldier died and 84 were injured during training, which was up from 67 injured and no deaths the previous year.

Also Tuesday, a tank caught fire during a training exercise at Tzeelim in the south of the country. There were no injuries.

The Tzeelim base was the site of two of the worst training accidents in IDF history, in 1990 and 1992. Five soldiers were killed in each of the incidents.

The Golan Heights is also pocked with minefields left over from the Syrian army, which planted them before the 1967 Six-Day War.

Israel captured part of the territory, which straddles the Syrian border, during the 1967 Six-Day War, and annexed the land in 1981.

The IDF conducts operations several times a year in order to move the unexploded mines to strategic areas, far away from populated areas and hiking trails.

Between the Golan Heights in the north and the Arava desert in the south, Israel has defused some 2,200 land mines in the last 20 years, according to the IDF website.

In 2010, two children were injured when they accidentally detonated a mine while hiking near Mount Hermon.