Leaked internal documents from Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest arms manufacturer, show the firm was in talks to sell the United Arab Emirates dozens of strategic drones, part of a much wider package of advanced Israeli armaments for the Gulf nation.

The documents, which date from late 2021 to early 2023, include price proposals sent to the UAE, requests received from the Gulf state and correspondence among senior sales and research officials at Elbit. It’s unclear whether or how many of the deals mentioned in the documents went through.

Iran-backed hacker group Handala recently published the documents after apparently stealing them from the private Gmail account of at least one Elbit official who had failed to use a secure company account in email chains with colleagues. The content of the documents was reported on Monday by the Haaretz newspaper and last week by the anti-Israel outlet Drop Site News.

Elbit opened an office in the UAE after the country normalized relations with Israel under the 2020 US-brokered Abraham Accords. But Elbit has only once, in January 2022, publicly acknowledged that it cut a deal with the UAE, when the firm announced a $53 million sale of defense systems for Emirati fueler jets.

However, Elbit announced in November that it had reached a $2.3 billion deal to sell unspecified strategic equipment to an unidentified customer, whom a French intelligence-focused magazine claimed was the UAE.

According to Haaretz, a leaked 2021 Elbit memo reportedly indicates that Israel’s Defense Ministry also gave the firm a green light to sell the UAE short-range SkyStriker loitering munitions and Hermes-900 surveillance........

© The Times of Israel