The battery was deployed to the northern town of Haifa Friday morning amid heightened tensions stemming from the Syrian civil war. At an Air Force pilots’ graduation ceremony Thursday, IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz said: “The region is shaking from north to south. Syrian is bleeding, In Lebanon, the flames have caught the hem of (Hizballah leader) Nasrallah’s robe.” It is incumbent on Israel, he said, to maintain its highest level of readiness in the face of these challenges. The new pilots, he said, are an integral safeguard for this state of readiness.