Haaretz.com  |  November 11, 2011

Report: Israel to equip airliners with anti-missile system as Libyan arms reach Gaza

Comment by unnamed official comes after Haaretz reported that Israeli officials were concerned that Hamas had been able to smuggle anti-aircraft missiles into Gaza Strip.

By Reuters

Flight 027 making an emergency landing at Ben-Gurion Airport early
May 23, 2011. Photo by: Ofer Vaknin

Israel has accelerated the installation of anti-missile defenses on its airliners, a security official told Reuters on Friday, seeing an enhanced risk of attack by militants using looted Libyan arms.

The security official's comment came after Haaretz reported last month that improved quality of anti-aircraft missiles held by Hamas in Gaza is increasingly worrying the Israeli defense establishment.

Hamas, the report indicated, recently managed to smuggle relatively advanced Russian missiles, which were looted from Libyan military warehouses, into the Gaza Strip.

On Friday, officials said Jets flown by El Al and two other Israeli carriers are being equipped with a locally made system known as C-Music that uses a laser to "blind" heat-seeking missiles, the official said, giving a 2013 target for fitting most of the fleet.

As a stop-gap, Israel is adapting air force counter-measures for use aboard civilian planes, said the official, who declined to elaborate on the technologies involved, or to be identified.

"We have long been aware of the threat and were ahead of the rest of the world in preparing for it. Libya has meant government orders to step things up even further," the official said, citing intelligence assessments that chaos during the North African nation's uprising against Muammar Gaddafi allowed trafficking of Libyan shoulder-fired missiles to Palestinians and al Qaeda-linked groups in the Egyptian Sinai.

Original article here.