Merkava 3 Spotted With New Armor

Starting late April, older variants of Merkava 3 appeared with new, possibly somewhat improvized side armor.

Merkava 3 tanks in their early form have flat sides. Later, based on lessons from operations in the South Lebanon Security Belt (1985-2000), a new armor package was developed and installed, giving the Merkava 3 a rounder shape, closer to the Merkava 4.

Early Merkava 3 with flat side armor

Late Merkava 3 with applique side armor giving it a round shape

However, as with other upgrades (including a major FCS upgrade), the applique was not retrofitted to all tanks, and to this day some are still rolling with the same old configuration.

As far as I am aware, only the 14th reserve armor brigade of the 252nd division (Sinai Division) still operates those tanks.

The Merkava 3 was also planned to receive Trophy at some point, by the way, but the program does not seem to have progressed anywhere, and these make sense as the IDF was in the process of down-sizing its armored corps.

Hundreds of tanks were planned to be sold abroad, and certain general purpose vehicles acquired by the IDF are conversions of old withdrawn Merkava 3 tanks, like the Pereg recovery and maintenance vehicle, and Ofek C2 vehicle.

I also remind that reserve units are, for many reasons, usually kept back while active units deal with the more intense and dangerous threats, and reservists act as reinforcing elements to handle lower priority tasks.

From that we can conclude the IDF shouldn't have high motivation to invest in a sophisticated solution to the early Merkava 3s increasingly inadequate protection.

It is certainly possible the IDF has little to no capacity to produce new dedicated armor kits for the Merkava 3 anyway. 

The Israeli industries are however making all sorts of armor solutions, and these the IDF can buy quickly, package in a locally made case, and fit however many and wherever needed.

We have already seen numerous, seemingly random configurations involving multiple box sizes, mounting points, and number of mounted boxes.

I believe it is highly likely that maintenance units were instructed to weld mounting points on the field, thus field conditions. And multiple sizes were created to cope with overall inaccuracies in installing said mounting points, so that every tank could be fitted with armor boxes as needed.