The Israel Defense Forces plans to establish a new space division to expand the IDF’s capabilities beyond Earth, Defense Minister Israel Katz said Tuesday.
In a Hebrew-language post on X, he described the initiative as part of an effort to make the Jewish state one of the world’s leading military space powers.
The IDF announced on Monday that a brigadier general had been selected to lead the new unit, which will oversee the development and coordination of military capabilities in space. Katz said the goal was to enable Israel to “monitor, defend and strike from space,” strengthening its ability to counter threats from both near and distant enemies.
Katz described the initiative as “blue-and-white Star Wars,” saying it would help transform Jerusalem from a regional power into a global military and technological power.
“Satellite communications are operated from several secret bases across the country,” a senior IDF official told Israel Hayom earlier this month. “Together with the deployment of our strategic satellites, this gives us the ability to operate with digital freedom in Iran.”
He went on to say, “Space is no longer the future. It is an actual theater of war. Just as the IDF invested in maritime and aerial weapons systems, today it is also investing in space.”
Space-based systems protected Israeli civilians in Iran war
Israel is hardly alone in recognizing that space is no longer the backdrop of science fiction but a genuine operational front.
Speaking recently at the Air & Space Forces Association’s annual Air, Space & Cyber Conference in National Harbor, Md., U.S. Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink publicly acknowledged that Washington has weapons deployed in orbit, including capabilities whose details remain classified.
“The United States now has on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the Joint Force against hostile adversary action,” Meink said. In U.S. military terminology, the Joint Force refers to the armed services operating collectively.
According to the Israeli Ministry of Defense, during “Operation Roaring Lion” Israeli satellites surveilled hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of Iranian territory daily throughout the campaign, generating tens of thousands of satellite images that guided strike planning, enabled immediate battle-damage assessments after each wave, and served as a critical early warning system for the home front.
Maj. Gen. (res.) Isaac Ben-Israel, a former chairman of the Israel Space Agency (ISA) and the National Council for Research and Development who now heads the Security Studies program at Tel Aviv University, told JNS in June that space-based systems played a direct role in protecting Israeli civilians during the recent war.
Israelis would not have received the missile alerts they became used to, he said, “without those space activities.”
