According to a report, two months before Hamas attacked
Israel, the Pentagon awarded a multi million dollar contract to build US troop
facilities for a secret base it maintains deep within Israel’s Negev desert,
just 20 miles from Gaza. Code-named ‘Site 5’, the longstanding US base is a
radar facility that monitors the skies for missile attacks on Israel.
On
October 07, however, when thousands of Hamas rockets were launched, Site 512
saw nothing — because it is focused on Iran, more than 700 miles away.
The US Army is quietly moving ahead with construction at
Site 512, a classified base perched atop Mt. Har Qeren in the Negev, to include
what government records describe as a ‘life support facility’: military speak
for barracks-like structures for personnel.
Though President Joe Biden and the White House insist that
there are no plans to send U.S. troops to Israel amid its war on Hamas, a
secret US military presence in Israel already exists. And the government
contracts and budget documents show it is evidently growing.
The US$35.8 million US troop facility, not publicly
announced or previously reported, was obliquely referenced in an August 02 contract
announcement by the Pentagon. Though the Defense Department has taken pains to
obscure the site’s true nature — describing it in other records merely as a
“classified worldwide” project — budget documents reviewed by The
Intercept reveal that it is part of Site 512.
“Sometimes something is treated as an official secret not in
the hope that an adversary would never find out about it but rather because the
U.S. government, for diplomatic or political reasons, does not want to
officially acknowledge it,” Paul Pillar, a former chief analyst at the CIA’s
counterterrorism center who said he had no specific knowledge of the base, told
The Intercept.
“In
this case, perhaps the base will be used to support operations elsewhere in the
Middle East in which any acknowledgment that they were staged from Israel, or
involved any cooperation with Israel, would be inconvenient and likely to
elicit more negative reactions than the operations otherwise would elicit.”
Rare acknowledgment of the US military presence in Israel
came in 2017, when the two countries inaugurated a military site that the US
government-funded Voice of America deemed “the first American
military base on Israeli soil.”
Israeli
Air Force’s Brig. Gen. Tzvika Haimovitch called it “historic.” He
said, “We established an American base in the State of Israel, in the Israel
Defense Forces, for the first time.”
A day later, the U.S. military denied that it was an
American base, insisting that it was merely a living facility for US
service members working at an Israeli base.
The US military employs similar euphemistic language to
characterize the new facility in Israel, which its procurement records describe
as a life support area.
Such obfuscation is typical of US military sites the
Pentagon wants to conceal. Site 512 has previously been referred to as a
“cooperative security location”: a designation that is intended to confer a
low-cost, light footprint presence but has been applied to bases that, as The
Intercept has previously reported, can house as many as 1,000 troops.
Site
512, however, wasn’t established to contend with a threat to Israel from
Palestinian militants but the danger posed by Iranian mid-range missiles.
The overwhelming focus on Iran continues to play out in the
US government’s response to the Hamas attack. In an attempt to counter Iran —
which aids both Hamas and Israel’s rival to the north, Hezbollah, a
Lebanese political group with a robust military wing, both of which are considered
terror groups by the US — the Pentagon has vastly expanded its presence in
the Middle East.
Following the attack, the US doubled the number of fighter
jets in the region and deployed two aircraft carriers off the coast of
Israel.
“My
speculation is that the secrecy is a holdover from when US presidential
administrations tried to offer a pretense of not siding with Israel.”
Top Republicans like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell
have nonetheless castigated Biden for his purported “weakness on
Iran.”
While
some media accounts have said Iran played a role in planning the Hamas attack,
there have been indications from the US intelligence community that
Iranian officials were surprised by the attack.
The history of the US–Israel relationship may be behind the
failure to acknowledge the base, said an expert on overseas US military bases.
“My speculation is that the secrecy is a holdover from when
US presidential administrations tried to offer a pretense of not siding with
Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Arab conflicts,” David Vine, a
professor of anthropology at American University, told The Intercept.
“The
announcement of US military bases in Israel in recent years likely reflects the
dropping of that pretense and a desire to more publicly proclaim support for
Israel.”
