RUTHFULLY YOURS

TEL AVIV — The Israel Navy unveiled details of its new Underwater Missions Unit, designed to conduct sabotage, reconnaissance and other operations. Military sources said the unit was also trained to repair the hull of ships while inside the water.

“Our level of diving today is among the best in the world,” unit commander, identified only as Maj. Oren, said.

“We are a small unit, one that is not very well known, but one that is extremely significant in wartime,” Oren said. “If our enemies plant the water with mines, we have to clean it up.”

The unit has also been battling Palestinian fighters from the Gaza Strip. Oren said this included a Hamas-directed campaign to send barrels of explosives to the neighboring Israeli coast.

“You see a strengthening in the Gaza Strip,” Oren said. “Their explosive materials are improving and they know how to create it from almost anything.”

Another operation was to locate Katyusha-class rockets fired from Egypt toward Israel. In April 2010, the unit quickly found a Grad BM-21 rocket that landed in the Gulf of Eilat.

“We threw a marking buoy, we went down, and to our surprise we found the rocket after 10 minutes,” Warrant Officer Yuval Gonda recalled. “We dove back in again in order to pull out the rocket from the sea. A rapid fall into the sea by a rocket is equivalent to a direct hit on the ground, so we understood that if the rocket was supposed to explode, it already exploded.”

In 2010, the unit conducted an exercise in which frogmen provided supplies to a submarine dozens of meters below the surface. The exercise was said to have included foreign naval personnel.

“We participate every year in more than 100 experiments below sea level,” Oren said.

The unit has helped inspect and repair such vessels as the INS Lahav, a missile boat. Officers said this has saved the navy hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in civilian contractor costs.

“It is not obvious that a 20-year-old finds himself underwater, holding a part that has just broken off from a submarine, with the understanding that if he doesn’t succeed in replacing it, he will be forcing the IDF’s most expensive piece of machinery into retirement,” Sgt. Barak Saar, a member of the unit, said.