An Israeli Air Force drone crashed into the Mediterranean Sea off the coast south of Tel Aviv Tuesday, the second drone crash in three months.

The Navy picked located the debris of the Hermes 450 UAV and brought it experts to analyze the reason for the malfunction, which probably was in the engine, according to preliminary estimates.

The drone was involved in a training exercise and not an intelligence operation, the military said.

The fourth U.S. drone attack on eight days killed four Al Qaeda-linked terrorists in eastern Yemen Monday while the terrorist network has succeeded in making the United States appear a weakling by threats that forced it to continue a shutdown of nearly 20 embassies and consulates in the Middle East.

One of the four terrorists had been placed on Yemen’s Most Wanted list of 25 Al Qaeda suspect.
American media have reported that intercepted communications between Al Qaeda leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri and the head of the Yemeni branch sparked a global travel alert.

An American drone strike in Yemen has killed Al Qaeda’s number two terrorist, Said al Shehri, who was freed from Guantanamo Bay in 2007 to Saudi Arabia and later fled to Yemen.

Al Shehri has been rumored several times in the past to have been killed, but this time, a senior Al Qaeda official confirmed his death on a video posted online.

“I present my condolences to all the Mujahideen on the martyrdom of Said al-Shehri who was killed in a US drone attack,” said Ibrahim al-Rubaish, a spokesman for the terrorist organization’s Arabian Peninsula operation, considered by the United States to be one of its most dangerous affiliates..

Security officials and aides to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu ordered his helicopter to halt its flight route in mid-air and to land after the Israeli Air Force spotted an enemy drone approaching northern Israel Thursday.

The Prime Minister was on his to war to tour the Galilee when the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) was spotted off the Haifa coast in the early afternoon.

While the helicopter pilot made an unscheduled landing, F-16 war planes and attack helicopters scrambled into the air.

The drone came within five nautical miles of the Mediterranean Coast when an F-16 blew it up. The Navy conducted a search for fragments of the drone, which anonymous military sources said was manufactured in Iran for Hezbollah.

A gag order on the attempted infiltration was lifted approximately two hours later. By that time, Prime Minister Netanyahu has safely returned to the air and attended a Druze cultural event.

The Israeli Air Force shot down a drone approximately five nautical miles off the Haifa coast as it flew towards the Mediterranean Coast at a height of approximately 6,000 feet. No one has claimed responsibility for the attempted infiltration, but it is assumed that Hezbollah or an affiliated terrorist group tried to penetrate Israeli air space.

A gag order on the IAF interception with a missile fired from an F-16 jet was lifted approximately three hours after the drone was blown up in mid-air.

“Israel is prepared to deal with any threat posed from Syria or Lebanon in the air, land or sea,” Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said after the IDF announced the incident.

Last November, a drone managed to penetrate Israeli airspace and was downed only after it reached the southern Hevron Hills, approximately 15 miles northeast of Be’er Sheva.

The drone was identified over the Gaza coast. Security officials did not release additional information, and it was speculated – without any confirmation – that the drone may have been headed towards the Dimona nuclear facility but that the IDF electronically took over the drone and directed it over a relatively unpopulated area.

The infiltration also may simply have been an attempt by Hezbollah to test Israel’s ability to detect low-flying drones.

Thursday’s drone may be an attempt by Hezbollah to draw attention away from its involvement in Syria, where heavy casualties have been reported the past several days. Hezbollah’s intense fighting alongside loyalists to Syrian President Bashar Assad further endangers the spread of the civil war into Lebanon, dominated by pro-Assad and Hezbollah parties against fiercely anti-Syria parties.

Hezbollah is largely financed by Iran, and Ahmadinejad, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and Syrian President Bashar Assad desperately need each other. Once one of the links in the “evil of axis” falls, all of the regimes’ leaders will be in danger.

Two news agencies in Lebanon and Syria claimed Wednesday evening that an Israeli drone was downed, possibly by a SAM anti-missile that was fired from Syria. The official Lebanese National News Agency reported, “The tail of a surface-to-air missile (SAM) fired from Syria fell in the outskirts of the Lebanese town of Deir al-Ashayer,” near the border between Syria and Lebanon and approximately 15 west of Damascus.

Last month, Israel is assumed to have been behind the aerial bombing in the same area of a truck convoy carrying advanced Soviet-made SA-17 anti-aircraft missiles intended for Hizbullah.

Israel has not commented on the reports of a downed drone but has stated several times it conducts surveillance flights over Lebanon to monitor terrorist activity and the transfer of weapons from Syria to Hizbullah in Lebanon.

IDF announces that not only did they destroy most of the long-range Fajr missiles, but also Hamas’s unmanned military drone program. (GLZ 23:41) Hamas didn’t even know that Israel knew all about it.