Israel's defense establishment recommends expanding the Navy to eight submarines, citing Turkey's growing fleet, the regional shift and October 7 lessons.
The Israeli defense establishment has formulated a new professional opinion that was delivered to the political echelon, unequivocally recommending that it expand the Navy's submarine fleet to eight in simultaneous service, Galei Tzahal reported on Tuesday.
The decision reflects a significant change in approach: instead of replacing older vessels with new ones while maintaining the current quota, the defense establishment is now seeking to expand the fleet in total, which currently numbers five active submarines and is expected to grow to six upon the upcoming arrival of the newest vessel.
The defense establishment's change in course stems from close tracking of the Turkish Navy's growth in recent years. Turkey currently has 14 active German-made submarines, similar in design to Israel's, and is expected to expand its fleet to 18 in the coming years. Along with the growing Turkish threat, the defense establishment's new position is influenced by the new regional reality and by lessons learned from the October 7th attacks.
The size of Israel's submarine fleet is a sensitive topic in the country, among other things, because the state commission of inquiry into the Submarine Affair (Case 3000) found that in the past no professional and orderly staff work was conducted regarding the required size of the fleet. While past internal debates in the defense establishment suggested that five or six submarines would suffice, it has now reached an official position supporting an expansive fleet.
Each submarine is estimated to cost approximately one billion euros. Under the latest procurement agreement signed with Germany, Israel retains an option to purchase a seventh submarine at the original price, an option that has not yet been exercised.
The defense establishment recommends exercising the option as soon as possible to avoid the expected price increase, then procuring an eighth submarine.
Senior officials have clarified that the broader initiative will not be advanced immediately because of the upcoming elections. However, the defense establishment intends to present it to the next government and push for its orderly implementation.
The Yom Kippur War: How Israel missed the warning signs before the surprise attack
Israel’s greatest failure in the Yom Kippur War was self-inflicted, as intelligence chief Eli Zeira’s confidence in his own assessment led Israel to dismiss mounting warnings of an Arab attack.
“This is the first time Israel is fighting a defensive war,” he told the cabinet. “We know how to do it from books, but we’ve never actually done it.”
Five days later, in an assessment to defense minister Moshe Dayan, Elazar’s message was blunter. “We cannot win this war.”
Every day the army was destroying Egyptian tanks in Sinai but losing tanks as well and giving up territory. Where would it stop? What the country needed now, said Elazar, was a stable ceasefire that would enable it to rebuild the army “for 100 years.”
The Arab armies that attacked in 1973 bore little resemblance to the ones that were defeated so handily just six years before in the Six Day War. They had been retrained by more than 10,000 Soviet military advisers and rearmed with modern weapons, some of which Israel had not seen before.
An IDF armored unit in its encampment on the east bank of the Suez Canal during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. (credit: YIGAL TOMARKIN/GPO)
The compact Sagger anti-tank missile had turned their hitherto feeble infantry into a formidable challenge for Israel’s vaunted tank corps, and the SAM antiaircraft missile threatened, even negated, Israel’s air superiority over the battlefield.
No less important, the Arabs this time had a sagacious and daring leader in Egyptian president Anwar Sadat.
Israel’s major failure on the eve of the Yom Kippur War was self-inflicted and attributable to one person – Maj.-Gen. Eli Zeira. As head of the Military Intelligence Directorate (MID), he had permitted himself to cross the line between self-confidence and vanity.
In a similar crisis period half a year before, he was the only one on the General Staff to say there would be no war despite serious warning signs. He proved right but for the wrong reasons. He believed that Sadat did not want war because he feared its consequences.
Years later, it was learned that Sadat had stood down only at the request of Syrian president Hafez Assad, who was awaiting shipment of crucial armaments from the Soviet Union, including ground-to-air missiles.
Zeira’s seeming win, however, discouraged his superiors from challenging his judgment in the future.
In the week before Yom Kippur, thousands of Israeli troops on the front lines could see an unprecedented Arab deployment opposite them, but warnings were dismissed in the chain of command on the basis of Zeira’s bold low-danger-of-war assessment.
Zeira continued to insist that the danger of war was low almost until the sirens sounded. Only in a death-bed interview last year (2025) at age 97 did he admit that he had been wrong.
Ironically, it was MID, during his tenure, that had come up with a device regarded as insurance for tracking any Arab decision to go to war.
In the spring of 1973, a helicopter carrying communication technicians and a commando escort flew at night into Egypt and landed near military communication hubs where the technicians inserted special taps which could be activated from Israel – reportedly from Zeira’s office. The phones being tapped were of Egyptian units that would be involved in war preparations.
The device came to be called Special Means. After tests confirmed that the taps worked, the device was shut down.
The intelligence failure that left Israel blind
AS TENSIONS built up in the week before Yom Kippur (which fell on October 6), Elazar twice asked Zeira if he had picked up anything relevant. Zeira gave Elazar to understand that the device was activated but not producing anything relevant. But the taps had not been activated. Zeira feared that activation risked exposure.
Col. Yoel Ben-Porat, head of the vital Signals Intelligence section which tapped electronic devices in the Arab world, asked for permission to mobilize 200 intelligence reservists, in view of rising tensions.
“Yoel, listen well,” said Zeira. “I don’t permit you to even think about mobilizing a fraction of a reservist. It is not intelligence’s job to drive the public crazy nor to undermine the economy.”
When the veteran intelligence officer then recommended activation of Special Means, Zeira refused.
“What do these resources exist for,” asked an exasperated Ben-Porat, “if not for situations like the one we’re facing?”
“The situations you see,” replied Zeira, “are not the ones that I see.”
Zeira had apparently not turned the device on because he was certain, as he had been in the spring, that Sadat saw war as too risky. To activate the device during this fraught period risked its discovery by the Egyptians.
Two days before Yom Kippur Dayan asked what the device was producing. Dayan could not be denied. The device was turned on for several hours, but the conversations picked up were banal.
After the war, the diary of an Egyptian soldier was found on the battlefield and turned over to intelligence analysts.
Sgt. Mahmoud Nadeh introduced himself in his fresh notebook on the shore of the Bitter Lake. “We’ll begin from the beginning. I serve as a sergeant in the armed forces. We’ll be going to war in the next few days. I’m 2.5 km. from the enemy. We’ve been told that we will be the first to cross the [Suez] Canal to free our lands and expel the enemy.”
He promised in the name of “historical truth” to keep an accurate account of events.
The notebook offered insight into the mind of a university-educated Egyptian soldier whose kind was now to be found in large numbers in the armed services alongside peasants and urban slum dwellers.
A third-year humanities student from Alexandria, he had been trained as a commando but was now attached to an amphibious armored unit that was to cross the Bitter Lake. “We are to proceed with all possible speed to the Mitla Pass after an artillery barrage of 50 minutes. I hope to emerge alive from the battle because I believe in God. There is a smile on everyone’s face, even my officer’s.”
Four days before Yom Kippur, Sgt. Yoram Krivine’s platoon took over Strongpoint 111 on the Golan ceasefire line. It was a routine rotation of units, but it struck the 21-year-old paratrooper that the soldiers being relieved seemed unusually happy about leaving. The dark basalt rocks of the igloo-like fort seemed stout enough to withstand even direct artillery hits.
The hillock on which 111 was situated offered a view across the rocky Syrian plain. Krivine could see countless artillery pieces, tanks and half-tracks nestling under camouflage netting. Opposite was Tel Kudne, a strong Syrian position on a volcanic cone. A hundred meters from 111 was one of the UN observation posts positioned along the ceasefire line.
The newcomers were briefed by an intelligence officer attached to the unit they were relieving. The officer identified the Syrian units they were facing.
“The whole Syrian Army is out there,” he said in conclusion. “I’m happy I won’t be here when the war starts.”
Warnings from the front lines
PRIME MINISTER Golda Meir’s contentious meeting with Austrian chancellor Bruno Kreisky about his decision to close down a transit camp for Jews from the Soviet Union on their way to Israel was still on her mind the next day, Wednesday, October 3, when she met with her senior military advisers.
“He didn’t even offer me a glass of water,” she said.
The meeting in the Prime Minister’s Office was described as a consultation by Moshe Dayan, who had requested it.
Though he was a military icon, Dayan related to the 75-year-old grandmother with the deference due her position.
There were reports, he said, that Egypt was bent on war, but the situation on the Syrian front was more troubling. The Syrians had deployed their most advanced SAM antiaircraft missiles not around Damascus, their capital, but covering the Golan.
“This is not a normal defensive deployment,” he noted.
If the Egyptians crossed the canal, Dayan said, they would find themselves in desert with Israeli tanks attacking them from every side. But the Syrians, with just one quick thrust, could hope to push Israel off the Golan and then be protected against counterattacks by the steep heights and the Jordan River below.
Zeira, who had called in sick, was represented by his deputy, Gen. Arye Shalev. On the Suez front, Shalev said, the Egyptian army was engaged in a large-scale military exercise.
“In my opinion,” said the MID officer, “on the basis of much material received in recent days, Egypt believes it is not yet ready to go to war. And if Egypt is not going to war, then neither is Syria.”
Elazar agreed. If Syria were thinking of attacking on its own, he said, Israel would know about it. “When a big machine begins moving, there will be leaks.”
Meir did not choose to challenge a roomful of generals counseling calm, but she remained uneasy.
Security concerns were no longer considered weighty enough by MID to be put on the agenda of the cabinet meeting scheduled for the next day, Thursday, October 4, to hear Meir’s report on her European trip. The government thus remained unaware that the possibility of war was being mooted in high places.
Nor would the bold Arab deployment be referred to at the General Staff meeting. The sole subject on its agenda – two days before Yom Kippur – was discipline, especially the need for soldiers to adhere to the military dress code.
So sanguine was the Israeli high command about the situation that no air photos of the Egyptian lines had been taken between September 25 and October 1, a week when large convoys were moving to the canal zone every night.
A scheduled photo mission on October 2 was canceled because of poor visibility. It was rescheduled for the next day, but when the plane returned, it was found that the camera shutter had failed to open. It would not be until the afternoon of the next day, Thursday, that the mission would finally be executed. It would take all night to process and analyze the photos.
Meanwhile, in Cairo, Sadat had summoned the Soviet ambassador, Vladimir Vinogradov, on October 3 to inform him that Egypt and Syria had decided to go to war against Israel in order to break the Middle East deadlock.
“What will the Soviet attitude be?” he asked.
The reply from Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev was cool. The decision about war was for the Egyptian leadership alone to make, he said. No well wishes were offered for Arab success.
Brezhnev asked permission to land large passenger planes at an Egyptian airbase the next day to evacuate families of Soviet advisers.
Sadat did not like any part of that reply but did not make an issue of it.
Teams of Israeli photo interpreters combed through the films brought back by the reconnaissance plane all Thursday night, counting every tank and artillery piece. The photos showed a stunning Egyptian buildup the length of the canal.
“You can get a stroke just from the numbers,” said Dayan. “There are 1,100 artillery pieces compared to 802 eight days ago. You people don’t take the Arabs seriously enough.”
Elazar was still not certain there would be war and did not request mobilization, but he canceled all leaves; many frontline soldiers were scheduled to be released for Yom Kippur in the coming hours.
Leading a nation into war was not a role Meir had ever imagined for herself. But she was coping thus far with the steadiness that marked her long public career, picking up the nuances in what the military men were saying and asking relevant questions.
Responding to Meir’s closest adviser, minister Israel Galili, Elazar said he would not mobilize reserves unless there were further indications of war. Initiating mobilization could itself easily lead to escalation by the other side.
IDF medical crew evacuating an injured soldier from the battle field during Yom Kippur War (credit: IDF FLICKR)
The warning that finally reached Israel
MOSSAD CHIEF Zvi Zamir was wakened at 2:30 a.m. in Tel Aviv by a call from his bureau chief, Freddy Eini, who informed him that his most important agent, Ashraf Marwan, wished to meet with Zamir in London the coming night.
Marwan was the son-in-law of former Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, and a prolific spy. Among other things, he had transmitted to Zamir a copy of Egypt’s plans for an initial attack on Israel. Zamir asked Eini to book a ticket for him on the earliest morning flight to London and arrange for security teams to accompany him on the flight and in London.
As he sat in bed mulling over the call, the phone rang again. This time it was Zeira, who rarely called him at home. He wanted to inform Zamir about the Soviets evacuating the families of their advisers and to know what Zamir made of it.
Zamir, in turn, told him of Marwan’s phone message and of his own plan to fly to London in the morning to meet him. He also told of the code word signaling war.
He didn’t want to wake Golda at this hour, so he asked Zeira to inform her of his trip in the morning. The two men disliked each other, whether for professional or personal reasons, but they managed to conduct this informative conversation civilly.
For Egyptian commanders, the absence of any sign that Israel might be aware of the coming attack was reason for either concern or comfort. Might the Israelis be planning a massive ambush? Or will they be totally surprised?
Toward midnight, scouting teams were sent across the canal at several points to report on any activity they saw. All returned before dawn with the same message: The Jews are sleeping.
One Jew wide awake was Zamir. In London, he was not fasting, and he had not heard a cantor singing the Kol Nidre prayer. But no Jew this Yom Kippur night was gripped by a greater sense of worldly portent than he was. He was meeting with Marwan in a private apartment.
“He [Sadat] is starting the war tomorrow,” said Marwan.
The attack plan was little changed from the one he had passed on to Zamir a few months before. First, an air attack on the Bar-Lev Line – 16 “forts” spaced along the eastern bank of the nearly 200-km.-long Suez Canal. Intensive shelling would follow. Then five infantry divisions would cross the canal in rubber boats, a crossing that would take two days to complete. They would establish two bridgeheads on the Sinai bank. Prefabricated pontoon bridges would then be lowered into the water and floated across.
After dark, commando units would be helicoptered deeper into Sinai to prepare ambushes for Israeli reserve units that would be on their way to the front within a day or two.
Once or twice, Marwan said he was sure that the situation was clear to the Israelis and that they were taking the necessary steps.
He sounded, in fact, like he wasn’t sure. “How can you people not see that this is war?”
The odd remark, Zamir reckoned, may have stemmed from something his sources in Cairo had told him, perhaps that Egypt was unaware of any Israeli countermeasures.
After the meeting, Zamir and Marwan’s case officer and their security detail walked 15 minutes to the apartment of the Mossad station chief in London. The Israeli Embassy was shut because of the holy day, and the only way to transmit his message – the most important Zamir would ever send – was by telephone.
Before leaving for London, he had arranged with his bureau chief, Eini, that he would compose his message as a bland, boring business letter with code words that would enable Eini to ferret out the meaning.
Zamir sat down at a table and asked for paper and a pencil. He then drafted the message about visitors who would be coming to Israel despite the holiday.
The hidden message Eini would reveal would be stunning – before the blast of the shofar marked the end of Yom Kippur this coming night, before the last invocation calling on God to open the gates of heaven and receive his people’s prayers, Israel would be at war on two fronts, with two thirds of the army – its reserves – still unmobilized.
A drone view of people attending Selichot prayers before Yom Kippur, in which Jews offer repentance and ask God to forgive their sins, at the Western Wall in Jerusalem’s Old City, early on September 18, 2026. (Ilan Rosenberg/Reuters)
Israel shut down Sunday afternoon for Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar, which begins at sundown and ends Monday night.
Times of Israel’s news coverage will resume when the Yom Kippur fast ends in Israel.
The Day of Atonement came amid violence across the region.
In the West Bank, just hours before the start of Yom Kippur, a man in his 30s was killed in a terror attack when a gunman opened fire on Israelis who had gathered for the traditional practice of immersing in a natural spring ahead of the holiday. The IDF later captured the alleged terrorist responsible.
Separately, the army said troops shot dead a Palestinian who allegedly attempted to ram forces in the West Bank with his vehicle.
Meanwhile, tensions persisted in the war between the US and Iran, and fighting continued between the Tehran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen and a Saudi-led coalition.
Israeli soldiers remain deployed in Gaza, southern Lebanon, and southwestern Syria, and settler violence has surged in the West Bank, where the Jewish holidays have previously been a time of heightened tension. The holiday season began with Rosh Hashanah 10 days ago, and will continue through Simchat Torah on October 3.
For Israel, it was the first year since 2023 when Yom Kippur arrived without major fighting on any front; Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack took place less than two weeks after the holiday that year. This was also the first Yom Kippur in more than a decade that no Israelis were held captive in Gaza.
The Israel Defense Forces said Friday it was ramping up its forces on all fronts ahead of the fast day, with additional companies deployed in the Northern, Southern, and Central commands, and a senior officer on duty in each sector during the holiday.
An Israeli soldier walks along the border with the Gaza Strip, September 6, 2026. (Tsafrir Abayov/Flash90)
A senior commander told Channel 13 that the situation in Gaza was “calm” but said the IDF “would not get complacent.” The commander said the army did not discount the possibility that it may have to resume major ground operations in the Strip.
The Kerem Shalom border crossing with Gaza was closed on Sunday and Monday, and crossings into Jordan and Egypt – including the Allenby Crossing, in the West Bank – were also set to shut down for the holiday, reopening Monday night and Tuesday.
Israel Railways ended its services at 1 p.m., to resume on Tuesday. Buses, both intercity and local, stopped running completely by 3 p.m., with services to resume on Monday night. Light rail lines shut down by 2 p.m.
The last flights in and out of Ben Gurion Airport came and went at around 2 p.m., with the first arrival after the holiday slated for 10:30 p.m. on Monday, and the first departure an hour after that. Israel closes its airspace for the duration of the holiday each year.
A man, wrapped in a prayer shawl, crosses an empty street on Yom Kippur, in Jerusalem. October 2, 2025. (Jamal Awad/Flash90)
About three-quarters of Jewish Israelis fast on Yom Kippur, according to an August poll by the Israel Democracy Institute, including about half of those who identify as secular.
Among those who identify as Orthodox or ultra-Orthodox, overwhelming majorities (more than 97%) observe the full fast from sundown on Sunday to nightfall on Monday, while 90% of those who identify as traditional observe either the full fast or a partial fast.
Among secular Jews in Israel, 28% observe a full fast, and 19% a partial fast.
Public prayer in Tel Aviv, on Yom Kippur, October 2, 2025. (Erik Marmor/Flash90)
A majority (57%) of Jewish Israelis attend synagogue services on Yom Kippur – mostly Orthodox services, though 6% of Jewish Israelis pray at Reform or Conservative services.
About a third of those who attend synagogue on Yom Kippur don’t typically do so on any other day of the year.
Many traditional and religious Jews also attend Selichot services in the days and weeks leading up to the holiday, reciting special penitential prayers, either early in the morning or late at night.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife, Sara Netanyahu, attend the final Selichot prayers before Yom Kippur at the Western Wall in Jerusalem’s Old City, in the early hours of September 20, 2026. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)
Tens of thousands attended “selichot” services at the Western Wall in Jerusalem on Saturday night, with the Western Wall Heritage Foundation placing the number at some 150,000. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attended from a perch above the main event.
Driving on the Day of Atonement is considered taboo, and roads are generally empty of cars, save for occasional emergency vehicles. Many secular Israelis also treat the day as a cycling holiday, taking advantage of the car-free roads, including highways.
Yom Kippur is one of the busiest days of the year for emergency calls, with hundreds of extra medics, paramedics, ambulances and volunteers deployed across the country.
Most injuries come from bicycle accidents. Other common Yom Kippur injuries are caused by parents leaving children unattended outside synagogues and by dehydration and complications from fasting.
'Sponge of the sea': Israeli researchers develop aerogel that captures, breaks down oil spills
BGU researchers created an aerogel that could capture oil spills while helping oil-eating bacteria degrade the pollutants.
Oil spills occur regularly around the world, but large, catastrophic disasters are much less common than small, everyday leaks.
Thousands of minor spills happen every year during routine tasks like refueling ships, pipeline leaks, or equipment failures on land. In the 1970s, there were between 70 and 100 large tanker spills annually. Fortunately, major marine spills from tanker accidents have dropped by more than 90% since the 1970s, with fewer than 10% per year.
Spills actually occur more frequently on land near storage tanks, industrial sites, and pipelines, but these get more attention because they spread fast and harm fragile ocean and coastal habitats.
Nature is also responsible – the single largest source of oil entering the oceans isn’t human error at all; it is natural seepage from rocks on the seafloor, accounting for about 40% to 50% of all oceanic oil.
Israelis probably remember February 2021, when its most severe and prominent modern disaster – a massive undisclosed spill (estimated at dozens to hundreds of tons of crude oil) sent heavy black tar washing ashore. It contaminated roughly 160 kilometers of Israel’s 195-km. coastline, from Rosh Hanikra to Ashkelon, severely harming marine wildlife like sea turtles and birds. They recall seeing masses of seabirds covered in tar and dying as a result of the environmental catastrophe.
An absorbent is used to show oil slick in the waters off Refugio State Beach on the Californian coast in Goleta, California, United States, May 21, 2015. An oil pipeline that burst along the California coast, fouling pristine beach and stretch of ocean near Santa Barbara, is believed to have spilled (credit: KEVORK DJANSEZIAN/REUTERS)
But now, researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) in Beersheba are the first to develop a technology that captures and biologically breaks down oil pollution, treating crude oil and fuel pollution in marine and aquatic environments – a promising approach to both immediate containment and long-term environmental recovery.
The BGU technology is aimed at both the immediate capture of hydrocarbons and their longer-term degradation. Lab experiments showed that the material can adsorb approximately 80 to 100 times its own mass in crude oil, fuel, tar, and other hydrocarbons.
It was developed in the university’s Environmental Biotechnology Laboratory, led by Prof. Ariel Kushmaro and Dr. Danit Lisa Karsagi Biron of BGU’s Faculty of Engineering.
They created a porous aerogel made from cellulose fibers – that could be created from used egg cartons, old newspapers, and other paper materials – enriched with nitrogen and phosphorus. These nutrients support oil-degrading bacteria, making it possible for the material not only to capture pollutants but also to speed their subsequent biological breakdown.
The research team said they developed the aerogel using nutrient enrichment, freeze-drying, and pyrolysis (the thermal decomposition of organic materials at high temperatures – typically 300°C to 900°C) in the absence of oxygen, which prevents combustion.
Kushmaro told The Jerusalem Post in an interview that the aerogel provides a surface on which the bacteria can attach, bringing them into close contact with both the adsorbed hydrocarbons and the nutrients they require. In this way, the system creates conditions that support the microbial breakdown of the captured pollutants.
The process can even minimize the need to remove and dispose of contaminated adsorption material after treatment. The technology is currently undergoing patent recognition through BGN Technologies, BGU’s technology commercialization company.
Kushmaro earned his doctorate with distinction from Tel Aviv University and trained as a postdoctoral fellow at the Hebrew University’s Kevin Center for the Study of Infectious and Tropical Diseases and at Harvard University.
He joined BGU in 2001 and established the microbial ecology and microbial biotechnology lab, which focuses on investigating wastewater microbiology, marine microbial ecology, and the antimicrobial activity of various microorganisms.
The team published their innovative findings in Chemical Engineering Journal Advances under the title “Nutrient-supplemented carbonized aerogels for integrated oil adsorption and biodegradation in water.”
The most unusual aspect of the invention is not simply that an aerogel absorbs 100 times its weight, but the clever idea of turning the material into a little habitat for oil-eating bacteria, so that capture and biological cleanup happen together.
This study, from 1999 to 2002, began with identifying the environmental sensitivity of Israel’s Mediterranean coastline to marine oil spills.
It includes GIS sensitivity mapping (using geographic information systems to analyze and visualize the relative vulnerability of environmental, ecological, or cultural resources to specific human activities or natural disasters) and an analysis of the environmental vulnerability of Israel’s shoreline resources.
The study analyzes the main sources of risk for maritime accidents in the southeastern Mediterranean and develops scenarios for possible oil spill incidents, including an analysis of protection priorities for the various coastal ecosystems, in the event of a large spill.
“We described the form and structure of Israel’s coastline, and measured the physical features of oceans, seas, lakes, and rivers, and meteorological patterns that dominate and control the dynamics of the shorelines, as well as the potential for major oil spills. We also studied the different ways in which oil spills can affect natural ecosystems and socio-economic resources along the coastline of Israel,” Kushmaro said.
The study “aims at determining the relative sensitivity of different types of shoreline and prioritizing the different types of shoreline and coastal resources to be protected following a large oil spill,” he continued.
“We also presented and analyzed data in a clear and useful way for the scientific and environmental communities, and those national authorities responsible for oil spill preparedness and response.”
Sensitivity of the Israeli Mediterranean
One of the main conclusions of the study was that the sensitivity of the Israeli Mediterranean coastline to oil spills “could be considered moderate, compared with other fragile ecosystems. This is mainly because of the form of the sandy beaches and the high exposure of most types of beaches to energetic natural cleanup processes,” Kushmaro said.
“Still, along the southeastern Mediterranean coastline there are ecosystems, habitats, shoreline types and coastal resources that are sensitive to oil spills,” he continued.
The 195 km. of the Mediterranean shoreline of Israel – from the chalky limestone vertical cliffs of Rosh Hanikra on the border with Lebanon to the white sandy beaches of Erez that border the Gaza Strip – are exposed to winds and surface sea current systems and heavy traffic of oil tankers in the eastern part of the Mediterranean. These create a constant threat of a serious oil pollution incident, he said.
Tar has stained nearly 160 km. of Israel’s coastline, devastating nature and wildlife: “There are still tar remnants from the 2021 disaster on some beaches that was called the spill one of the most serious ecological disasters in the country’s history.”
Israeli environmental protection agencies admitted then that the government was underfunded to deal with such disasters, and that there was not adequate legislation in place to prevent such a disaster in the future.
Nitrogen and phosphorus are added to the aerogel, which is hydrophobic and made from cellular fibers with a large amount of surface area, Kushmaro explained.
“When placed on water, it floats on the surface, which causes oil to clump together. It takes between two and three weeks for the oil to disappear. If the oil spill is in the middle of the sea, it can be dropped from a plane. The cellular material itself is biodegradable. We don’t believe that waves, currents, and changing temperatures would interfere with the cleanup,” he said.
It’s unfortunate that the aerogel had not yet been invented to cope with the 2021 catastrophe.
“Even now, it will take a few years. It worked in the lab. Now a company has to be established to test it in the sea and produce the material. We have a world patent on it. Shell, the global British multinational energy and petrochemical company, has already contacted us to ask for information about it,” he continued.
“The Environmental Protection Ministry knows about it, but it’s completely new, and we need regulation.”
“We dream about the possibility that every ship will have the aerogel on board, so that if it causes an oil spill, it can immediately break it down. They can immediately cause it to disintegrate before it causes damage,” Kushmaro said.
Asked what experiment he and his team would most like to do next that they couldn’t accomplish in their lab study, he said: “We would want to do it in a polluted marina. There is oil in all the ports.”
