Israel's drone dealers - People & Power - Al Jazeera English

Israel's drone dealers - People & Power - Al Jazeera English:

To most people, the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to track down and target terrorist suspects is most closely associated with the United States and its western allies. Only this month, for example, 55 alleged al-Qaeda fighters were reportedly killed during American-led drone strikes on a training base in southern Yemen.

The attacks were just the latest in a string of operations that have run from Afghanistan to Pakistan and Somalia in recent years, all orchestrated by the CIA, and which have become a hallmark of US President Barack Obama administration's "war on terror"; so far around 2,500 people have been killed by US UAV’s during his presidency.

Inevitably, this has generated growing international concern about the legality of such operations, the number of innocent civilians, including children, killed along the way, and anxiety about the "games console" morality of warfare in which an operator sits in insulated comfort hundreds or thousands of miles from his victim.

It’s a fair assumption then that most people would also think that the US had developed this technology in the first place, and that the use of drones for "targeted assassinations" was a tactic wholly of America’s devising.