A decommissioned military tank was stolen from a military base in northern Israel and found a few hours later in a nearby scrapyard, the country’s police said on Wednesday.
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Police say they were informed by the Ministry of Defense of the case of a “tank stolen during the night from a training base” near the city of Elyakim (between Tel Aviv and Haifa).
The searches made it possible to quickly find “the tank in a scrapyard near Nesher”, about twenty kilometers away, in the southern suburbs of Haifa, the police added. An investigation into theft was initiated.
The Israeli army, for its part, stated that the tank found was a Merkava 2 “decommissioned many years ago.”
This Israeli-made tank type was designed in the early 1980s.
“The tank was disarmed and not operational,” the army said in a statement, adding that it was parked at a target practice area open to hikers.
This is the second time this year that a disabled Israeli tank has disappeared in cloudy conditions.
In February, a tank was recovered from a military monument in the Israeli-occupied and annexed Syrian Golan Heights with the aim of being deployed during an anti-government demonstration. The person driving the armored vehicle claimed to have a permit, was arrested by police for not having a tank license, and the tank was returned to its place of origin, local press reported.