U.S. security sources quoted by The Daily Beast claim Israeli forces plan to use electronic warfare to shut down Iranian electrical grid, cellphone networks.
Haaretz
Israel intends to electronic warfare on Iranian civilian infrastructures in the event of a strike against the Islamic Republic’s nuclear facilities, The Daily Beast reported on Thursday, amid ongoing fallout from a damning report by the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog.
Last week, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) released a report stating that Iran was working to gain nuclear weapons’ capabilities, a claim that has been made by both Israel and the United States for several years.
The report prompted Israel to urge the international community to act at once to thwart Iran’s nuclear ambitions using harsher sanctions, with some estimating that the report gave Israel the backing it needed to undertake a military strike of Tehran’s nuclear facilities.
On Thursday, however, The Daily Beast quoted U.S. security officials as claiming that a possible Israeli strike would go as far as targeting Iran’s civilian infrastructure, including the country’s internet and cellphone networks, as well as its electrical grid.
The Daily Beast, quoting what it said “current and former U.S. intelligence officials,” claimed that Israel has developed weapons that could imitate a maintenance cellphone signal that commands a cell network to go inactive, “effectively stopping transmissions.”
In 2007, a suspected Syrian nuclear site was destroyed in what many estimate was an attack by Israel Air Force warplanes. A report in Aviation Week & Space Technology not long after the alleged attack claimed that Israeli forces had knocked out Syria’s entire radar system as a prelude to the attack.
According to the report, the Syrian radar site was hit with a combination of electronic attack and precision bombs to allow the IAF to enter and exit Syrian airspace unobserved.
Subsequently all of Syria’s air-defense radar system went off the air for a period of time that encompassed the raid, U.S. intelligence analysts told Aviation Week.
