NDTV Exclusive: How Israel Quietly Armed India's Jets To Win Kargil War Against Pakistan In 1999

Twenty-seven years after Indian soldiers scaled the icy heights above the Drass Valley to reclaim territory from Pakistani intruders, a new chapter of the Kargil War has come to light, one that unfolded not on the battlefield but in hangars, workshops, and late-night phone calls between Tel Aviv and New Delhi.In an exclusive interview with NDTV, timed to the Kargil Vijay Diwas, two former Israeli Air Force officers have spoken for the first time on Indian television about a covert defence partnership that helped equip the Indian Air Force during Operation Vijay and Operation Safed Sagar, the joint Army-Air Force campaign that repelled Pakistani forces in 1999.Ami, a former civilian program manager at Rafael Advanced Defence Systems, and Shlomo, a veteran Israeli Air Force fighter pilot and former Mirage squadron commander, described how a project that began years before the war as a routine defence contract turned, almost overnight, into…