A Heron drone at the Palmahim air base in Israel in December of 2011. Photo: AP/Dan Balilty
The latest round of fighting between Israel and Hamas has settled into an uneasy ceasefire. But that won’t stop Israel’s drones from filling the skies over Gaza. In this 2009 story, written during the final days of the last Israel-Hamas conflict, we took a look at how one drone pilot grappled with the moral choices that came with remotely spying, and ordering death, from above.
JERUSALEM — The man was a few seconds from an all-but-certain death, when Gil told everyone to call off the airstrike.
This was Sunday. Gil, a captain in the Israeli Air Force, was sitting in a green-painted metal box on the Palmahim Air Base, south of Tel Aviv. In front of him was a joystick and a set of screens. They showed footage of a Gaza slum, taken by an unarmed Israeli spy drone with an infrared sensor. Gil had the sensor display a dark shade for heat. Which gave the images on Gil’s screen an inverted feel; white was black, and black was white. More>> How Israeli Drone Pilots Made Their Life-and-Death Choices Over Gaza
