2 AWACS, air-to-air missiles on agenda for Netanyahu visit

Top diplomats based in New Delhi and Tel Aviv said on condition of anonymity that an advanced security liaison team from Israel will land in Delhi on September 2 to prepare ground for the prime ministerial visit.

Updated on: Jun 22, 2020, 21:14:17 IST

Hindustan Times, New Delhi | By Shishir Gupta

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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is expected to visit India for a day two weeks from now. On the agenda are the acquisition of two more Airborne Warning and Control Systems (AWACS) and extended range air to air Derby missiles by the Indian Air Force and joint projects in agriculture, water and waste management.

While India has five AWACS platforms, Pakistan already has seven such with another three on order from China. (Reuters Photo)

Top diplomats based in New Delhi and Tel Aviv said on condition of anonymity that an advanced security liaison team from Israel will land in Delhi on September 2 to prepare ground for the prime ministerial visit. While the exact date has not been decided, Netanyahu is expected to meet his friend Prime Minister Narendra Modi either on September 7 or 8.

Arriving in India a week before the September 17 general elections in Israel, Netanyahu is expected to endorse Modi government’s scrapping of articles 370 and 35 A in Kashmir as an internal matter and support the bilateral resolution of issues between India and Pakistan, the diplomats said.

Although the two allies typically play down the defence content of the across-the-spectrum relationship, India plans to order two PHALCON AWACS mounted on Russian A-50 platform (worth $ 2 billion) for better control of the war theatre .

The order is awaiting a green signal from the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS).

While India has five AWACS platforms, Pakistan already has seven such with another three on order from China. Islamabad already has three SAAB Erieye and four ZDK-03 from China, which were deployed 24X7 after the Balakot air strike by the Indian Air Force on a terrorist facility in Pakistan. Given this differential, IAF deployed AWACS for only 12 hours a day.

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The IAF is also looking towards the acquisition of extended range Derby air to air missiles from Israel after Pakistan used 70 km AIM-120 C 100 kilometre beyond visual range missiles against Indian jets in its February 27 retaliation to the Balakot strike.

IAF wants to integrate the 70 kilometre range Derby missiles on the Su-30 MKI platform with upgraded radar equipped with data link to take the fight to Pakistani F-16s in future.

India and Israel are jointly developing the short, medium and long range surface to air missiles in collaboration with the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO).

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Apart from the defence agenda, PM Modi is looking towards his Israeli counterpart to provide high-end technologies to provide potable water to each home as well as manage waste. Israel has mastered the technology to convert sea water into potable water with desalination projects in Ashkelon and Hadera through reverse osmosis.

Both countries are already collaborating the fields of start-ups as well as agricultural technologies focused on irrigation and productivity.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More

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