On Saturday at 10 AM, the IDF control systems identified a penetration by an unmanned aircraft from the Mediterranean, entering over Gaza, into the south of Israel.

The drone was under continuous surveillance from the air and the ground upon entering Israeli airspace, including an escort from IAF fighter jets, as it traveled some 100 kilometers over Israel.

The drone was shot down by an F-16 (“Sufa”) with an anti-aircraft missile, in the area of Yatir forest in the northern Negev (the south Mount Hebron area), in order to prevent damage to populated areas.

IDF forces are collecting fragments of the aircraft to try to identify with certainty its origin and mission.

It is now believed that the drone was launched from Lebanon and traveled south until it turned into Israel. That could mean it was controlled by Hezbollah or Iran.

IDF Spokesperson Yoav Mordechai said the drone was being tracked the entire time it was over Israel.

Prime Minister Netanyahu praised the IDF’s actions and said, “We will continue to defend our borders at sea, on land and in the air to secure Israel’s citizens.”

MK Miri Regev (Likud) wrote on her Facebook page that the drone was an Iranian drone launched by Hezbollah.

MK Michael Ben-Ari (National Union) is saying the traversal of the drone over Israeli airspace for nearly a half hour was a significant security failure.

An organization in Israel wants to use unmanned aerial vehicles to check the national eruv in problematic spots.

The Shabbat Fund has placed a proposal on the table to purchase the UAVs at a cost of more than $6,000 per drone, the Bechadrei Charedim website reported.

The drone could save manpower hours and get to hard-to-reach places such as farmland and privately owned lands in order to detect breaches in the eruv, according to the fund.

An eruv creates a boundary that allows observant Jews to carry items in public areas on Shabbat.

A member of the fund told Bechadrei Charedim that it is still too early to “rejoice” at the prospect.

“We are still checking,” he said. “We have not seen yet the product, nor have we checked its efficacy.”

The Palestinian news agency Ma’an reported that an Israeli military surveillance zeppelin crashed near the Gaza Strip after a civilian crop duster struck its cable.

The balloon, used for observing Gaza from above, crashed Friday on Israel’s side of the border.

There were no reports of injury after the incident.

In January, an unmanned aerial drone crashed in central Israel during a drill. Two years earlier, a reconnaissance drone crashed in the Gaza Strip and was recovered during an incursion. Hamas’ al-Qassam Brigades seized a smaller drone in 2007.

Iran has started manufacturing models of its captured US spy plane, the commander of the Aerospace Force of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps announced on Saturday, Mehr reported.

Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, speaking on the anniversary of the establishment of the IRGC also said experts are receiving information from the captured spy plane.

Iran announced on December 4, 2011 that the spy drone, RQ170 Sentinel, which had violated Iran’s air space, had been downed by the armed forces of the Islamic Republic but did not say when the incident had taken place.

At the time, Iran claimed that it had ambushed The US’s sophisticated drone, with Iranian experts tricking the drone into landing where it “thought” was its Afghanistan base, which in reality was in Iran.

But US analysts prefer another explanation, which is that the drone had malfunctioned and drifted into Iranian territory.

Turkish intelligence officials have accused Israel of aiding the Kurdish rebel group PKK, claiming that Israeli drones gathered data that assisted the group in establishing training sites on the Turkey-Syria border.

According to a report drafted by Turkish intelligence officials and obtained by Turkish daily Today’s Zaman, PKK training bases “[w]ere set up in areas that are known to be weakspots for the Turkish military, after they obtained intelligence collected by the drones.”

The intelligence report also claimed that a senior PKK member visited Israel several times in recent years.