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In a report on Saturday, the American news organization The Intercept said that the Pentagon was quietly moving ahead to construct facilities for American troops at its secret military base – codenamed Site 512 – deep within the Negev Desert, just 20 miles from the Gaza Strip.
It added that the longstanding Site 512 is in fact a radar facility, whose mission is monitoring the skies for missile attacks against Israel, yet it failed to detect thousands of rockets fired by the Palestinian Hamas resistance group on October 7 as it focused on possible incoming missiles from Iran, more than 700 miles away.
The Pentagon awarded the $35.8 million US troop facility contract to add barracks-like structures for US personnel to Site 512, which is atop Mt. Har Qeren in the Negev, almost two months before the current war between Israel and Hamas began, it said.
The report comes as US President Joe Biden and his administration claim that Washington has no plan whatsoever to deploy US troops inside the Occupied Palestine to engage in the current war but an [alleged] secret US military presence in the Occupied Territories already exists, and government contracts and budget documents show it is evidently increasing.
“Sometimes something is treated as an official secret not in the hope that an adversary would never find out about it but rather [because] the US government, for diplomatic or political reasons, does not want to officially acknowledge it,” Paul Pillar, a former chief analyst at the CIA’s counter-terrorism center who said he had no specific knowledge of the base, told The Intercept.
“In this case, perhaps the base will be used to support operations elsewhere in West Asia in which any acknowledgment that they were staged from Israel, or involved any cooperation with Israel, would be inconvenient and likely to elicit more negative reactions than the operations otherwise would elicit,” he added.
The Pentagon claims to have prepared 2,000 personnel and a range of units on a heightened standby for potential deployment to the Occupied Palestine, stressing that these forces are not intended to serve in combat roles and are purportedly tasked with advising and medical roles.
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