"Israelis" using its occupation zone in the south to test a secret guided missile - with the Lebanese as target practice - before placing the weapon on the international arms market. A civilian has been killed and four others, including three fighters, have been wounded since May by the "Israeli"-manufactured "mini cruise missile".

The Daily Star has learned that the missile is almost certainly the NT Dandy, also known as "Long Spike", under development by "Israel's' state-owned Rafael armaments company, based in Haifa.
The existence of a new long-range, guided anti-tank missile, apparently far more advanced in design and capabilities than existing anti-armor projectiles, has been rumored for more than a year but it is known to have been used, amid great secrecy, in Lebanon only since February.

The missile, still on the "Israeli' army's classified list, has sparked considerable speculation among weapon specialists, Unifil and the Lebanese army.

The first recorded use of the missile was on February 25, when a mysterious projectile was launched from an "Israeli" compound near the village of Taibeh in the occupation zone. The missile, travelling at the relatively slow speed of between 150 metres and 200 metres per second, targeted a civilian car 7.5km away on the outskirts of Majdal Selem. The impact was adjacent to the car and the occupants escaped injury.

Then, on the night of May 19, two identical missiles were fired from Taibeh at a unit of Amal guerrillas who were passing a tobacco field in Majdal Selem on their way to infiltrate the zone.
Finnish Unifil soldiers manning a position near Taibeh said the missiles were fired two minutes apart and made a noise like "a jet plane". The first veered off course and exploded near Touline. As the second missile approached the guerrillas, flying at an estimated altitude of 150 metres to 300 metres, the Finnish soldiers noted that "it appeared to be searching for its target" and almost stopped before suddenly plunging to the ground. Three of the guerrillas were wounded, one seriously, in the blast, which occurred only 20 metres from the scene of the February incident.

One of the guerrillas who escaped injury told The Daily Star that he and his comrades only spotted the missile when it was 200 metres away and had no time to react.

"It came as a complete surprise to us," he said. "We were more angry at having been spotted than being wounded."

Twelve days later at 3pm, Hussein Mouqalled, 20, and his I 7-year-old brother, Mohammad, were walking along a footpath halfway up a steep valley on the way to their home in Arab Salim. They had spent the day tending their beehives.

"I looked to my right and saw this rocket coming straight towards us. It was only about 300 metres from us," said Hussein.

The missile passed between the two men and detonated against the cliff wall. Mohammed caught the full blast and died almost instantly. Hussein escaped with severe flash burns to his back.

It was later discovered that the missile had been fired from a helicopter gunship almost 10km from the Mouqalled brothers and out of sight. The missile, which was seen by dozens of witnesses, skirted hills, flew over three villages and along the length of a valley before exploding a metre away from the two men. One of the witnesses said that the missile sounded like 'a truck spilling gravel onto the road".

The most recent sighting occurred on July 6 when a Norwegian Unifil soldier at a checkpoint in the eastern sector of the occupation zone saw a missile pass overhead. It exploded harmlessly into a nearby hillside, smashing several boulders.

The "Israeli" army admitted that the missile had gone out of control and immediately instructed Unifil to stay away from the blast site. The remains of the vital components were later collected by "Israeli" troops, leaving a few scraps of twisted metal for the peacekeepers to examine.

However, the Lebanese army was able to collect some of the fragments from the Arab Salim missile explosion, providing evidence to back a subsequent Lebanese complaint to the five-nation monitoring group.

In July last year, Jane's Defense Weekly revealed that Rafael was working on a "family" of three new anti-tank missiles. The first is a man-portable, shoulder-fired anti-tank weapon called the Oil, or "Short Spike"; the second, called Spike, has a greater range of around 4km. The "daddy of the family" was a long-range version designed to be launched from helicopters, known as the Dandy or "Long Spike".

Rafael, which is believed to be developing Israel's first cruise missile capable of carrying nuclear warheads, unveiled the Gil at the Paris air show in June last year. The Gil is now deployed by Israeli troops in the south and is being marketed to the UK, the US, the Netherlands and Germany.

But, other than admitting their existence, Rafael remains silent on the Gil's larger brothers, despite repeated requests for information from Unifil.

At approximately 1.5 metres in length and I 66mm in diameter and weighing 40kg, the Dandy is much the same size as the standard US-made TOW anti-tank missile, which is in use by some 40 countries, including "Israel".

Unlike the Gil, which is shoulder-fired and has fins that deploy after launching, the Dandy has fixed fins and is designed to be launched from helicopters. The missile is guided by an optic fibre during the initial stages of flight enabling the weapon to hug the terrain and thus make it difficult to detect, before locking onto its target for the final approach. It is also almost certainly equipped with a thermal-imaging device which would have allowed the missile to detect the body heat of the Amal guerrillas at night.

A Unifil officer said that the technology for such a weapon exists. "All it takes is for someone to incorporate all the various techniques into one missile," he noted. The circumstances surrounding the use of the missiles since February suggest that the "Israelis" are more interested in testing the guidance system than killing people. The reason the Artial guerrillas survived the attack was probably because the missile was carrying an anti-tank warhead rather than a high explosive charge more appropriate for anti-personnel use. The two occasions on which the missile spun out of control and crashed indicates that it is still not filly developed.

The Amal guerrillas may have been spotted by a special forces unit, a drone or a helicopter gunship. The "Israelis" admitted that all three were deployed in the vicinity of Majdal Silm that night. The Mouqalled brothers were in clear view of the "Israeli" Soweida post, 3km away.

The low-intensity guerrilla war in the south provides the perfect arena for testing new weapons, with the presence of guerrillas allowing the "Israelis" to prove the weapon in combat, a factor which can help in marketing the weapon to overseas clients. The Unifil officer said: "They have a ready-made firing range in the south. It's the perfect place for them to try out new weapons against real targets without any repercussions." Once the system has been perfected, the "Israelis" could conceivably use the missile to assassinate resistance leaders north of the zone.

Abbas Musawi, the former secretary-general of Hizbullah, was killed in 1992 along with his wife and child when his car was hit in an aerial ambush near Jibsheit by a Hellfire missile launched from a US-made Apache helicopter.

"The advantage of the new missile is that if you have guerrillas in one of six houses, it can be launched from a long distance and flown directly into the house containing the guerrillas without damaging the other buildings," said Christopher Foss of Jane's Defence Weekly. The army, which has been studying the fragments collected from Arab Salim, admit there is little they can do to counter the missile.

Col Maher Toufeili, Lebanon's delegate to the monitoring group, said: "The Lebanese have always been subject to threats from "Israel", be it a new or old weapon. We're always the victims."
The use of the Dandy in the south is by no means the first time the "Israelis" have used the occupation zone as a firing range.

Three weeks ago, "Israeli" artillery near Meis Al-Jabal shelled an area north of the occupation zone for no apparent reason. The targeted area is rarely bombarded and there was no resistance activity at the time.

Unifil subsequently learned that a unit of trainee artillery soldiers had been sent to the zone to practice their firing skills.