The Egyptian Ministry of Defence has marked the celebration of Naval Force Day with the video of first ship-to-ship missiles destroying Israeli warship Eilat in the Mediterranean off the coasts of the Sinai Peninsula in 1967. The video footage shared on Twitter, deleted later, shows the moment several missiles hit a warship flying an Israeli flag.
عظمة دي اوي ❤️? pic.twitter.com/Icz7fPNoPr
— Ahmed Farhat (@AhmedfarhatSeo) October 22, 2020
As per the report published in Avia.pro, “the shots in the video – according to some sources, are real shots taken during the military clashes between Egypt and Israel several decades ago”.
The Israeli Warship Eilat was originally the HMS Zealous, a Z-class British destroyer during World War II, sold to Israel by the United Kingdom in 1955. INS Eilat, built in 1944 by Cammell Laird, was the world’s first warship destroyed by ship-to-ship missiles.
The warship had entered the Egyptian national waters as a show of force in the Mediterranean off the coasts of the Sinai Peninsula on October 21, 1967. The Sinai Peninsula was occupied by Israel in June of the same year.
However, Israel claims that the Eilat with its 199-man crew was on a routine patrol when Egyptian Komar-class missile boats launched a scathing attack, which killed 47 Israeli sailors and wounded more than 100 others.
The Egyptian Navy attacked the Z-class destroyer by firing a number of P-15 Termit (SS-N-2 Styx) missiles using Soviet Project 183R class (Komar) boats. When the two missiles struck the hull, it cut the warship almost in half, following which a fire broke-put in the center of the destroyer, and it sank two minutes later.
The Israeli destroyer sunk in the Mediterranean in international waters off Port Said was attacked four months after Egypt’s defeat in the six-day war in 1967.
The Six-Day war was a short but a bloody conflict between Israel and the Arab states of Egypt, Syria and Jordan following the years several decades of political tension and military conflict between the neighbouring countries.
The conflict drastically changed the map of the Middle East as Israel Defense Forces had launched preemptive air strikes crippling the air forces of Egypt and its allies. This resulted in Israel capturing the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip from Egypt, the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria.
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As Egypt marks 22 October as Naval Forces Day for successfully destroying Israeli warship after getting defeated in the Six-Day War, Commander in Chief of the Navy Vice Admiral Ahmed Khaled was quoted by Egypt Today as saying that the operation contributed in reinstating Egyptians’ confidence in the Armed Forces and its capabilities.
