A historic day for the General Secretary: The Israeli Canine Unit has introduced an advanced observation system, which dramatically improves aerial detection capabilities.
The system includes a thermal camera, which was imported to Israel specifically for the IDF, and is adapted for installation on the unit's drone. The new equipment upgrades the unit's capabilities to uncover attempts to infiltrate settlements, even before the terrorists enter their territory, or to locate them within the settlement's boundaries after infiltration. The equipped drone also improves capabilities in searching for missing persons, especially at night.
For the purpose of the test flight, an exercise was conducted to locate a terrorist/missing person.
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The drone, equipped with a thermal camera, was flown in complete darkness from the air base to a distance of one kilometer, to a place defined in the exercise as the "tip of the iceberg" of the terrorist or the missing person, with 100 meters below it, on the ground, a dog and a dog also joining the search.
In real life, a lead could be a breach detected in a fence, the location of suspicious movement recorded by a sensor/camera, a missing person's personal item found in the area, the last place they were seen, and so on.
In this exercise, an IDF volunteer, impersonating the terrorist/missing person, hid by lying on the ground next to a tree, approximately 200 meters from the end of the wire.
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In one of the videos, white figures are clearly visible on the screen in the CCP, as broadcast from the camera, which captures the body heat emitted by the people and animals in the area: the dog and the handler are moving in the area, and the dog leads its handler straight to the curled-up white figure.
Optimal search and rescue work combines air and ground forces, and can direct the handler and dog to the search object quickly and efficiently, based on the images captured from the drone, and save lives.
Unfortunately, in many cases, such as the massacre of the Fogel family in Itamar, despite the fact that the IDF received a warning about unusual touching of the fence, the forces called to the area were unable to track down the terrorists, who waited in hiding until the forces left, and only then did they enter the house and begin their murderous campaign.
This unfortunate story was also repeated in the tragedy of the Salomon family in Neve Tzuf: the security guard received an alarm about an intrusion, and yet the terrorist managed to wander the settlement for about 20 minutes without being detected, until he murdered three members of the family on the 14th.
Sniffer and sniffer dogs, combined with a thermal camera on a drone, could have been of great help in locating and neutralizing the terrorists before they managed to murder people.
