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Israel Holds F-35 Drills in Anticipation of Regional War
by Jordan Hilger, Worthy News Correspondent
(Worthy News) - Israel is holding its first drills with US-purchased F-35 fighter jets this week, in a large-scale exercise designed to simulate a war with northern adversaries Hezbollah, Syria, and Russia.
Beginning on Sunday, the exercise, which marshals the full array of Israeli Air Force (IAF) technology, will last until Wednesday and span the Golan Heights, Jordan Rift Valley, Upper Galilee, Nahariyya and the Sea of Galilee.
“We are training at very high intensity with a challenging, thinking enemy that possesses technology beyond what currently exists in the arena,” a senior IAF officer told the Times of Israel Tuesday, as the exercise anticipates country-wide missile barrages and interface with advanced technologies like the Russian S-400 missile defense system.
Most telling perhaps was the exercise’s inclusion of a scenario involving a war on three fronts, one in Gaza Strip, one in Lebanon, and one in Syria: Three areas that serve as the base of operations for the Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and Fadl al-Abbas (LAFA) Iranian terror proxies respectively.
Israel’s last northern war was with Hezbollah in 2006’s Second Lebanon war, in which 165 Israelis, and more than 600 Hezbollah fighters, were killed, and which ended with a tenuous UN-brokered ceasefire.