ABOARD INS DRAKON — Just a few nautical miles west of Haifa, the Israeli Navy’s sixth submarine was approaching Israel’s coast on Thursday morning after a 3,792-nautical-mile (around 8,000-kilometer) voyage over the past 23 days from Germany.

At dawn, reporters had boarded a small Defender-class patrol boat and headed out to greet the INS Drakon — or Dragon — on the final leg of her maiden journey to the Haifa Naval Base, where a ceremony was planned in the vessel’s honor.

All of our electronic devices, from cellphones to key fobs, were taken away before departing the naval base, due to the military’s security concerns.

At 74 meters long and weighing a whopping 2,600 tons, the Dolphin 2-class submarine is the largest and heaviest yet in Israel’s service. Her delivery from Thyssenkrupp Marine Systems’ shipyard in Kiel, Germany, comes after around 12 years of planning, construction, and testing.

“Nothing could have prepared me for this. It has been an incredibly moving experience,” Cdr. “Ayin,” the captain of INS Drakon, said in an interview with The Times of Israel aboard the submarine.

Ayin, who can only be identified by the initial of his first name in Hebrew, spent the past three years living in Germany amid the construction of INS Drakon. “To complete a three-year journey in Germany, leave the port there and not return — that was a powerful moment. Contrary to what I expected, I was extremely emotional,” he said.

The submarine captain said that the lengthy voyage to Israel over the past three weeks “flew by… time flies.”

The INS Drakon is one of several vessels purchased from Thyssenkrupp as part of a series of murky deals worth some $2 billion at the center of a wide-ranging alleged corruption and bribery scandal, with accusations leveled against several high-level current and former officials, some of whom are close to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

A state commission of inquiry found that Netanyahu pushed for the purchase of a sixth submarine for the Israeli Navy, based on “unfounded assumptions” and in deviation from the needs of the country. He also avoided discussing the economic consequences of the purchase that were presented to him, unilaterally seeking to replace older submarines in Israel’s fleet with new ones by bypassing........

© The Times of Israel