Bezhalel Machlis has served as the president and CEO of Elbit Systems Ltd. since 2013.
From 2008 to 2012, he served as executive vice president and general manager of land and C4I, and he has served in various capacities with Elbit since 1991.
Prior to that, he served as an IDF artillery commander at the senior rank of colonel.
Elbit Systems is the IDF’s primary provider of unmanned aerial vehicles and land-based equipment.
On September 9, Elbit announced a new, cutting-edge wide-area persistent surveillance system called Frontier, which was designed to address the increasing complexity and intensity of border defense challenges. Frontier leverages advanced artificial intelligence to optimize intelligence gathering and decision-making in land, air, and maritime domains.
In January, the Defense Ministry signed two major agreements with Elbit. Under the first agreement, Elbit Systems will supply the IDF with thousands of heavy air munitions. Under the second agreement, Elbit will establish a national raw materials plant to produce raw and energetic materials that were sourced mainly from abroad before the war.
This project is expected to strengthen domestic manufacturing independence and reduce reliance on imported raw materials.
In August, Elbit said it had been awarded a $1.635 billion contract to deliver a range of defense solutions to a European country, including long-range precision strike artillery-rocket systems, a broad spectrum of unmanned reconnaissance and loitering aerial combat systems, as well as highly sophisticated intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition, and reconnaissance (ISTAR) capabilities, including signals intelligence (SIGINT), communications intelligence (COMINT), and electronic warfare systems.
Yuval Steinitz: Chairman of Rafael
Yuval Steinitz was appointed chairman of Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd. in April 2023.
Steinitz served as a member of Knesset and minister in the governments of Israel for 23 years and held a series of senior positions, including finance minister, intelligence minister, strategic affairs minister, and energy minister.
In July, Steinitz announced that the Iron Beam laser defense system would be fully deployed by the end of this year and also noted that it had already been used to shoot down around 40 Hezbollah drones in October 2024. Iron Beam is eventually expected to revolutionize the field of air defense by cutting the cost of shooting down enemy aerial threats to near zero.
Rafael also produces the Iron Dome and David’s Sling, the critical lower-tier and mid-tier of Israel’s air defenses, which successfully shot down the vast majority of Hamas’s and Hezbollah’s rockets throughout the current war, and a variety of other weapons systems.