So the story was that Australia's involvement in the Israel-Gaza conflict was just deploying some troops and aircraft to the Middle East. On 26 October 2023 Australia announced that it was dispatching a “significant contingent” (but unknown number) of troops and two Air Force Hercules aircraft to the Middle East amid the ongoing Israeli war on Gaza.
Defence Minister Richard Marles said Australia was deploying additional Australian defense force personnel and two aircraft to the Middle East region as part of “Operation Beech.” Two C-130J aircraft were to join a C-17A Globemaster heavy transport aircraft & forces already in the region. The Lockheed Martin C-130J Super Hercules is a four-engine turboprop military transport aircraft. The McDonnell Douglas/Boeing C-17 Globemaster III is a large military transport aircraft that was developed for the United States Air Force from the 1980s to the early 1990s by McDonnell Douglas and is a strategic transport aircraft, able to airlift cargo close to a battle area.
“The deployment of Australian aircraft and supporting Defense personnel is a precautionary measure to support the whole of Australian government contingency options due to the risk of the security situation deteriorating further,” he said on X, calling the situation “challenging and rapidly evolving.”
The two C-130J Air Force Hercules aircraft and troops will join Australia’s aircraft and ADF personnel deployed in the Middle East. The minister did not reveal where the contingent will be based in the region. According to reports the deployment was via Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion airport in Israel and Dubai. The two Air Force Hercules aircraft were supposedly deployed to assist in efforts to evacuate citizens. The Australian Army personnel from Townsville and Brisbane, were "deploying in a non-combat role".
That's all well and good. But is that where Australian military involvement in Israel stops?
Well, for a start, Marles' statement about "contingency options due to the risk of the security situation deteriorating further" kind of suggests if things escalated further - e.g. with Lebanon - Australian ADF deployments may become more active.
But more than that, Australia is already very actively CURRENTLY involved in supporting Israel's military actions in Gaza.
Pine Gap is a satellite surveillance base and Australian Earth station approximately 18 km (11 mi) south-west of the town of Alice Springs, Northern Territory in the center of Australia. It is jointly operated by Australia and the United States, and since 1988 it has been officially called the Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap (JDFPG); previously, it was known as Joint Defence Space Research Facility.
The station is partly run by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), US National Security Agency (NSA), and US National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and is a key contributor to the NSA's global interception/surveillance effort, which included the ECHELON program. The classified NRO name for the Pine Gap base is Australian Mission Ground Station (AMGS), while the unclassified cover term for the NSA function of the facility is RAINFALL.
Pine Gap is collecting an enormous range of communications and electronic intelligence from the brutal Gaza-Israel battlefield – and this data is being provided to the Israel Defence Forces.
Two large Orion geosynchronous signals intelligence satellites, belonging to the US and operated from Pine Gap, are located 36,000 kms above the equator over the Indian Ocean. From there, they look down on the Middle East, Europe and Africa, and gather huge amounts of intelligence data to beam back to the Pine Gap base.
After collecting and analysing the communications and intelligence data for the USA’s National Security Agency (NSA), Pine Gap is providing it to the Israel Defence Forces, as it steps up its brutal assault on Palestinians in the Gaza enclave.
“Pine Gap facility is monitoring the Gaza Strip and surrounding areas with all its resources, and gathering intelligence assessed to be useful to Israel,” a former Pine Gap employee has told Declassified Australia.
David Rosenberg worked inside Pine Gap as ‘team leader of weapon signals analysis’ for 18 years until 2008. He is a 23-year veteran of the National Security Agency (NSA).
“Pine Gap has satellites overhead. Every one of those assets would be on those locations, looking for anything that could help them.”
Rosenberg says the personnel at Pine Gap are tasked to collect signals such as ‘command and control’ centres in Gaza, with Hamas headquarters often located near hospitals, schools, and other civilian structures. “The aim would be to minimise casualties to non-combatants in achieving their objective of destroying Hamas.”
Not doing such a good job, it seems.
Since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel that killed over 1,400 Israelis, both military and civilian, the Israel Defence Forces has bombed hundreds of targets inside Gaza, killing far more than Hamas militants. An estimated 10,000 people so far have been killed, including most shockingly some 4,000 children.
United Nations agencies have deplored the nearly four week Israeli bombing campaign saying, “Gaza has become a ‘graveyard’ for children with thousands now killed under Israeli bombardment, while more than a million face dire shortages of essentials and a lifetime of trauma ahead.”
The sprawling satellite ground station outside Alice Springs, has been described as the United States’ second most important surveillance base globally.
About half the 800 personnel working at the Central Australian base are American, with Australian government employees making up fewer than 100 of the increasingly privatised staff.
The base is no mere passive communication collector. Personnel at the Pine Gap base provide vital detailed analysis and reporting on SIGINT (signals intelligence) and ELINT (electronic intelligence) it collects.
As well as surveillance of civilian, commercial, and military communications, it provides detailed geolocation intelligence to the US military that can be used to locate with precision targets in the battlefield.
This was first conclusively documented in a secret NSA document, titled “Site Profile”, leaked from the Edward Snowden archive to this writer and first published by ABC Australia in 2017:
“RAINFALL detects, collects, records, processes, analyses and reports on PROFORMA signals collected from tasked target entities.”
These PROFORMA signals are the communications data of radar and weapon systems collected in near real-time – they likely would include remote launch signals for Hamas rockets, as well as any threatened missile launches from Lebanon or Iran.
This present war in Gaza is not the first time the dishes of Pine Gap have assisted Israel’s military with intelligence, including the detecting of incoming missiles, according to this previous report.
“During the [1991] Gulf War, Israeli reports praised Australia for relaying Scud missile launch warnings from the Nurrungar joint US-Australian facility in South Australia, a task now assigned to Pine Gap.”
During the early stages of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, the NSA installed a data link to send early warning of any Iraqi missile launches detected directly to Israel’s Air Force headquarters at Tel Nof airbase, south of Tel Aviv.
The NSA “maintains a far-reaching technical and analytic relationship with the Israeli SIGINT National Unit (ISNU),” according to documents published by The Intercept in 2014. The documents show the NSA and ISNU are “sharing information on access, intercept, targeting, language, analysis and reporting”.
“This SIGINT relationship has increasingly been the catalyst for a broader intelligence relationship between the United States and Israel.
It’s thanks to the Pine Gap base, with its satellites so strategically positioned to monitor the Middle East region, along with its targeting and analysis capability, that Israel is able to make use of these benefits.
Another leaked document, a targeting exchange agreement from the UK’s surveillance agency, GCHQ, reveals one of the “specific intelligence topics” shared between the NSA, GCHQ and ISNU was “Palestinians”. The document states that “due to the sensitivities” of Israeli involvement that particular program does not include direct targeting of Palestinians themselves.
The NSA considers their intelligence-sharing arrangement as being “beneficial to both NSA’s and ISNU’s mission and intelligence requirements”.
This wide intelligence sharing arrangement potentially opens up to the Israelis the ‘jewels’ of the Five Eye global surveillance system collected by the NSA global surveillance network, including by Australia’s Pine Gap base.
Were there to be retaliations from the Arab world, or from others who support them (like Russia and China), as a result of Israel's (and the US's) current and possible further actions in the Middle East, Australia's involvement puts us fairly and squarely in the firing line....again.
Another excuse to accelerate Australia's weapons acquisitions...perhaps?
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