Palestinian security forces recovered a small Israeli drone that crashed in the northern West Bank on Tuesday morning, handing it over to the IDF through the Defense Ministry’s Civil Administration, the army said.
There did not appear to be a risk that classified information could be retrieved from the device, military officials said.
The Skylark-model unmanned aerial vehicle fell out of the sky near the West Bank city of Nablus for as-yet unknown reasons. “The circumstances are being investigated,” the army said in a statement on Tuesday.
This was the sixth Skylark UAV to crash this year. Earlier this month, a Skylark drone crashed in the southern Gaza Strip.
The terror group Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip, said it recovered the drone near the Al-Maghazi refugee camp, according to a Walla News report.
Two months before that, a Skylark drone crashed in southern Lebanon.
In March, two drones of the same model crashed while on reconnaissance missions, one of them in southern Syria and the other in the northern part of the Gaza Strip.
In January, a Skylark drone crashed in southern Lebanon, prompting a mad dash by Israeli forces to recover the aircraft. The next day, the Hezbollah terrorist group reported that it had retrieved pieces of the destroyed drone.
The “sky rider,” as it’s known in Hebrew, is a tactical surveillance drone created by Elbit Systems and operated by the IDF’s Artillery Corps. The miniature UAV can be launched by one or two people, depending on the model, and once airborne provides a live video feed to soldiers on the ground.
In August 2015, Hamas claimed it captured an Israeli Skylark drone in the Gaza Strip and reassembled it.
Photo: An IDF soldier from the Artillery Corps launches an Elbit Skylark drone, known in the IDF as a Sky Rider, on January 21, 2013. (Cpl. Zev Marmorstein/IDF Spokesperson’s Unit)
Source: The Times of Israel