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13 hurt, cottage alight as Israeli drone crashes into Arab village

Xinhua, August 9, 2016 Adjust font size:

A drone belonging to Israel's Aerospace Industries crashed on Tuesday in an Arab village in northern Israel, lightly wounding at least 13 people and setting an empty home ablaze, officials said.

A spokesman for Israel's emergency medical teams said that all of the injuries suffered from breathing difficulties after the drone crashed into a home in Zalafa, an Arab village north of the city of Umm al-Fahm.

Nearly a dozen of firefighting crews struggle to quell the fire, which severely damaged the house, said Yoram Levi, a spokesman for the fire service, adding that the house was still under construction and empty at the time of the crash.

The reason of the accident was still unclear, according to a statement released by the Aerospace Industry, Israel's government-owned manufacturers of weapons and civil aviation products, saying that the accident happened "during a training flight."

Israel's Ha'aretz newspaper reported that the drone was a Heron 1 type, which has been in service of the Israel Defense Forces for over a decade. Endit