On trip to Israel, Engel affirms U.S. support

After authoring a bill to guarantee U.S. funding of Israel’s anti-rocket defense shield, known as the Iron Dome, Riverdale’s Rep. Eliot Engel saw the fruit of America’s support of that system on a three-day trip to Israel last week.

Between meetings with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, members of parliament and other officials, Mr. Engel said he heard the gratitude of many Israelis.

“Wherever we went, everyone was thanking us, from elected officials to average people on the street, for funding for the Iron Dome,” Mr. Engel said in a recent phone interview.

After Mr. Engel introduced the Emergency Iron Dome Replenishment Act in July, as the latest conflict between Israel and Gaza reached a bloody peak, Congress went on to authorize $225 million in funding for the defense system. It reportedly has a 90-percent success rate at shooting down the rockets fired by Hamas militants.

Mr. Engel, the ranking Democrat on the House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee, pointed out that the funding allocation was one of the last things Congress did before going on summer recess. The legislature reconvened on Monday.

“It’s important to show solidarity with Israel. I think we drove home the point,” he said of the timing of the vote to fund the Iron Dome, which the U.S. has helped pay for since its inception in 2012.

Along with stops in Jerusalem and the southern city of Ashkalon, Mr. Engel and the Republican chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Ed Royce, visited tunnels used by Hamas to infiltrate Israeli territory. After conflict with Gaza broke out amid rocket attacks and the kidnapping of three Israeli teenagers, Mr. Netanyahu said one of the goals of  Israel’s ground and air strikes against Gaza was to end the threat posed by the tunnels.

Mr. Engel said a tunnel he and Mr. Royce entered was about a mile outside of Gaza and that after crawling through an entrance, the passage opened into a space an adult could walk through.