"We are a small unit, one that is not very well known, but one that is
extremely significant in wartime," Oren said. "If our enemies plant the
water with mines, we have to clean it up."
The unit has also been battling Palestinian fighters from the Gaza
Strip. Oren said this included a Hamas-directed campaign to send barrels of
explosives to the neighboring Israeli coast.
"You see a strengthening in the Gaza Strip," Oren said. "Their explosive
materials are improving and they know how to create it from almost
anything."
Another operation was to locate Katyusha-class rockets fired from Egypt
toward Israel. In April 2010, the unit quickly found a Grad BM-21 rocket
that landed in the Gulf of Eilat.
"We threw a marking buoy, we went down, and to our surprise we found the
rocket after 10 minutes," Warrant Officer Yuval Gonda recalled. "We dove
back in again in order to pull out the rocket from the sea. A rapid fall
into the sea by a rocket is equivalent to a direct hit on the ground, so we
understood that if the rocket was supposed to explode, it already exploded."
In 2010, the unit conducted an exercise in which frogmen provided
supplies to a submarine dozens of meters below the surface. The exercise was
said to have included foreign naval personnel.
"We participate every year in more than 100 experiments below sea
level," Oren said.
The unit has helped inspect and repair such vessels as the INS Lahav, a
missile boat. Officers said this has saved the navy hundreds of thousands of
dollars per year in civilian contractor costs.
"It is not obvious that a 20-year-old finds himself underwater, holding
a part that has just broken off from a submarine, with the understanding
that if he doesn't succeed in replacing it, he will be forcing the IDF's
most expensive piece of machinery into retirement," Sgt. Barak Saar, a
member of the unit, said.