Israeli forces in southern Lebanon and northern Israel are contending with a new threat from Hezbollah militants: exploding drones designed to evade electronic jamming.
Hezbollah has been attacking with the deadly drones in recent weeks, and Israel is still trying to figure out how to defend against them, according to several Israeli military officials and a Western official. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to discuss the issue publicly.
The drones are controlled not by radio signals but by thin, almost invisible fibre-optic cables. They have long been in use in the war in Ukraine.
Largely immune to the kind of jamming of communications and global positioning systems that Israel employs against regular drones, the fibre-optic ones can also fly low and fast. That makes them harder to detect and destroy, experts say.
The Israeli military was inadequately prepared to defend against this new tactic, though not surprised by it, according to an Israeli official and a former Israeli security official.
For now, Israel is improvising, according to former national security adviser to the Israeli government Eyal Hulata. He said that the military was using, among other approaches, nets that the drones cannot penetrate to protect buildings and vehicles used by Israeli forces.
“We will probably see a ramping up of technological solutions, both to detect and take down” the drones, Mr Hulata told reporters on April 30.
That was “not an impossible mission” for a country that can intercept ballistic missiles from hundreds of kilometres away, he said. But if Israel does not find a good solution, it may soon be contending with fibre-optic drones aimed at civilian homes across the border in Israel, he added.
Hezbollah’s sponsor, Iran, has relied on drones heavily to retaliate for the war launched against it by the US and Israel, striking targets in other Persian Gulf states. It has also exported drones to other countries, including Russia.
Now, Hezbollah is using drones to deadly effect. Neither the Israeli military nor Hezbollah have detailed which of the strikes were carried out by fibre-optic drones, as opposed to ordinary drones.
On April 30, an Israeli soldier was killed in southern Lebanon by what Israeli news outlets described as a drone strike. The Israeli military confirmed that an explosive drone fell earlier in the day inside Israeli territory, in the Shomera area near the border with Lebanon, wounding several soldiers.
A video shared on social media by Israeli news outlets and verified by The New York Times shows emergency crews on April 30 responding to damage to military vehicles and a synagogue in a compound near Shomera.
At least one other soldier and a civilian contractor working for Israel’s Defence Ministry were killed by explosive drones in Lebanon this week, according to the military and Israeli media reports.
A video released on April 30 on a Hezbollah-linked Telegram account claimed that the group struck an Israeli military vehicle in the southern Lebanese town of Al Bayada on April 29. The video first shows a person handling a multi-rotor drone before switching to footage captured from a drone camera. The video, geolocated by the Times, then shows a drone crashing into an armoured vehicle.
For the past three weeks, Hezbollah has circulated videos almost every day purporting to show drone strikes aimed at Israeli targets. Then on April 30, an image shared on Hezbollah-linked media platforms boasted of “the thread that shifts the equation” – an apparent reference to fibre-optic cables. “One thin fibre can threaten the most advanced technology,” the text said.
A senior Hezbollah official said on April 30 that the technology was low cost compared with Israeli weaponry but that it has made Israel’s military easy targets on the battlefield. He spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the group’s security matters.
The drones are an addition to Hezbollah’s arsenal of rockets and anti-tank missiles, which have long plagued Israel’s military and northern civilian communities.
One Israeli military official said Hezbollah’s fibre-optic drones have a range of 15km to 20km. That means Hezbollah can launch them from beyond the zone that Israeli forces are currently occupying in southern Lebanon, which reaches about 9.7km north of the Israeli border.
The latest round of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah began in early March, when Hezbollah fired rockets at Israel after the US and Israel began a war against Iran.
Israel responded with an offensive against the militants and invaded southern Lebanon.
Although US President Donald Trump announced a ceasefire in Lebanon in April, Israel and Hezbollah have continued to trade attacks almost daily. NYTIMES
Additional reporting by Rawan Sheikh Ahmad, Hwaida Saad, Dayana Iwaza and James McManagan