2016-07-27
JERUSALEM, July 11 (AP) - A group of American Jews has offered to train and provide sniffer dogs to Israel to help find Palestinian suicide bombers and attack them before they kill, an Israeli Cabinet minister said Thursday.

The group, which calls the project "Pups for Peace," has offered to buy the dogs, set up a school in the Golan Heights to train them and their Israeli handlers, said Public Security Minister Uzi Landau. The group is based in Los Angeles.

"They identify with us because of the problems which we are currently facing," he told Israel Radio, adding that the group had also offered to finance the project.

More than 200 Israelis have been killed in the last two years by Palestinian suicide bombers, who usually wear the explosives in a special vest.

The dogs would be trained to smell explosives at a distance and attack the bomber, pinning him to the ground before he could get into a crowd of civilians, Landau said.

The Israeli army and police already use sniffer dogs to detect explosives and have also used attack dogs for some years along sections of the line between Israel and the West Bank, the newspaper Yediot Ahronot said. But Landau said many civilian lives could be saved if the dogs were used on a larger scale.

The police have never publicized their use of attack dogs for fear of awakening memories of the dogs used in the Nazi death camps, the paper said. The attack dogs currently used by the Israeli police are muzzled.

Landau said the main obstacle to creating the problem was that currently, Israeli police are forbidden from receiving donations. The ministry, however, was trying to get around the prohibition.

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