ALBAWABA - In an investigation by the American news organization The Intercept, it is claimed that two months before the surprise Hamas attack on Israel, The Pentagon granted a multimillion-dollar contract to build U.S. troop facilities for a secret military base just 20 miles from Gaza, under the code name "Site 512,".
The investigation claims that the U.S. Army is quietly moving ahead with construction at Site 512, a classified base perched atop Mt. Har Qeren in the Negev, to include what government records describe as a “life support facility”: military speak for barracks-like structures for personnel, The Intercept reported.
Despite the number of government contracts and budget documents proving that the U.S. military presence is growing, President Joe Biden still stands by the claims that there are no plans to send U.S. troops to Israel amid its war on Hamas.
Paul Pillar, a former chief analyst at the CIA’s counterterrorism center who said he had no specific knowledge of the base, told The Intercept that: "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 U.S. government, for diplomatic or political reasons, does not want to officially acknowledge it,".
In 2017, the two countries inaugurated a military base that the US government-funded referred to by American media as "the first American military base on Israeli soil." Brig. Gen. Tzvika Haimovitch of the Israeli Air Force called it "historic."
Brig. Gen. Haimovitch went on to say, "We established an American base in the State of Israel, in the Israel Defense Forces, for the first time".
Site 512 has previously been referred to as a "cooperative security location": a designation designed to provide a low-cost, minimal footprint presence but has been applied to military bases that may hold up to 1,000 troops, as The Intercept previously documented.
