Delhi gets air safety lessons in Tel Aviv

The two-member team, official sources said, was sent at the invitation of the Israeli Government and were granted full access to Israel’s highly sophisticated security systems, their functioning and deployment at Ben Gurion airport.

It’s learnt that the team, which spent five days there, studied in detail finer aspects of airport safety like perimeter security, passenger scrutiny and access, sanitisation of the baggage area and effective deployment of personnel.

In particular, the team is said to have focussed on the integrated functioning of various agencies at the airport besides studying back-up and emergency procedures.

The two sides also exchanged views on each country’s experiences like the Kandahar hijack and the one in Entebbe in the case of Israel. The team was given an overview on the functioning of anti-hijack squads in Israel with particular emphasis on training and deployment of sky marshals and the nature of their weapons.

The security procedures, sources said, could not simply be replicated in India. It’s learnt that the security machinery at Ben Gurion airport is designed to focus more on non-Israelis while the same may not hold true in India.

Similarly, official sources said, the scale of operations in India is much larger given that India has more than one international airport and at least a dozen of them are categorised as either ‘‘hyper sensitive’’ or ‘‘sensitive’’ at any given point in time.

But this, officials said, does not detract from the lessons which can be drawn from the airport security machinery there. The team also participated in workshops on civil aviation security. These were designed under the Indo-Israeli Task Force on Terrorism and have proved to be an effective forum for both sides to jointly address security issues.

Sources said both countries decided to have workshops on border security and control. This will give New Delhi an insight into how Tel Aviv manages its highly sensitive borders and the flow of people.

While this visit was underway, Secretary in the MEA R M Abhyankar simultaneously held talks with the Director General in Israel’s Foreign Ministry Yoaev Biran. The talks focussed on cyber terrorism with special emphasis on how systems could be hacked in key areas like power generation and distribution as well as command and control of nuclear weapons.