THE United States has deployed a sophisticated long-range radar system in Israel capable of providing crucial early warning in case of a missile attack.

There is growing anxiety in Israel and the US that Iran, which makes no secret of its long-range ballistic missiles or its uranium enrichment program, could launch an offensive against Israel.

According to the US newspaper Defense News , published by The Army Times , the radar system was flown to Israel in parts over the past week and will be installed at a military base in the Negev desert in the south of the country.

An unnamed Israeli official told The New York Times that the radar would serve not only Israel, but the US, and would be operated by 120 US staff.

Ephraim Kam, the deputy director of Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies, called the radar system an “important addition” to Israel’s defences and said he believed the US was sending a message that “they are against any attack by Israel on Iran’s nuclear facilities at this time but cannot leave us without protection”.

The Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz reported the deployment could be seen either as a means of preventing Israel from taking independent action against Iran, or to strengthen Israel’s defence against missiles if Israel attacked Iran’s nuclear facilities.

It is believed to be the first time US personnel have been stationed in Israel since the 1991 Gulf war, when Patriot anti-missile batteries were deployed against Iraqi Scud missiles. Last week the Guardian in London quoted European diplomatic sources as saying that the US President, George Bush, had told Israel’s Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, in mid-May that he opposed an Israeli attack on Iran, and said his opinion was unlikely to change for the duration of his presidency.

Despite the close strategic relationship between the two countries, Israel has traditionally preferred to staff its own defences and not depend on foHTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2010 13:06:28 GMT Server: Apache X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.1 X-Pingback: http://wonews.de/fa_blog/xmlrpc.php Connection: close Transfer-Encoding: chunked Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

OK

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, support@one.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.