TEL AVIV — A standoff on Israel's border has long raged between the Iran-backed Hezbollah group's vast rocket stockpile and its vaunted “Iron Dome” missile defense system, which is adept at dealing with most missiles.
But to circumvent this linchpin of Israel's national security strategy, Hezbollah is deploying seemingly simpler weapons from its arsenal: fast, low-flying drones, often commercial-grade, designed to gather intelligence and drop explosives.
As these drones strike Israeli military sites and civilian homes, it has also reignited debate over the decade-old air defense system, which many fear provides incomplete protection against Israel's various foes, especially as those enemies continue to experiment with new weapons and new ways to use old ones.
The imminent threat of a regional war with Hezbollah and its allies has Israel scrambling to rebuild its air defenses to counter these new, low-tech threats.
Israel was shocked on Tuesday when Hezbollah demonstrated its drone capabilities by releasing drone footage of a key Israeli military base in the port of Haifa, about 15 miles from the Lebanese border. Hezbollah said the footage was taken by a drone that returned to Lebanon undetected.
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“What we released yesterday is just a small part of the hours of footage shot in Haifa,” Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said in a speech on Wednesday. “No place will be safe from our missiles and drones.”
Hezbollah released drone footage of the Haifa area, including the city, port, residential and military facilities, military infrastructure, and the port. pic.twitter.com/GOY06zZxqf
— Ali Hashem on Demand (@alihashem_tv) June 18, 2024
IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Helgi Halevi said the footage showed “the capabilities we are aware of.”
“We are preparing and building solutions for these capabilities and others to match them when needed,” he said on Wednesday at the Iron Dome battery in northern Israel.
Shortly after the footage was released, the Israeli military announced that it had “approved an operational plan to attack Lebanon.”
U.S. Special Envoy Amos Hochstein, speaking in Beirut on Tuesday after shuttling between Israel and Lebanon, called for a diplomatic solution, saying the region was “at a dangerous time and a critical juncture.”
Both Israel and Hezbollah say they do not want war but are preparing for it, and for Israel that means rethinking old ideas about the benefits and limits of its technological superiority.
Hezbollah's drone tactics – using agile, radar-evading drones for reconnaissance and bombing – are not new but have come into public discussion in recent weeks as retaliatory attacks across the border have intensified.
Hezbollah's small, remote-controlled drones, which appear to be readily available for purchase from stores, can operate without relying on radio signals and can fly at speeds of up to 125 miles per hour, allowing them to fly low and skirt the mountains and canyons along the border, slipping past Israeli detection networks.
The Israeli military could mistake the drone for an Israeli aircraft or a bird, and even if they did, drones don't follow a straight trajectory like missiles, so shooting down a surveillance drone could do more damage than returning it to a control center.
On Fenig, CEO of Israeli signal processing and machine learning startup R2, said the war between Ukraine and Russia, in which both sides relied heavily on drones, and now the increasing war between Israel and Hezbollah, are emblematic of “the modern battlefield where threats are evolving beyond the visible spectrum.”
In the case of the Ukraine war, both sides have used drones, but neither has been able to find an effective defense against them, leaving the battlefield in a stalemate. It is unclear how Israel plans to resolve the drone issue.
“Hezbollah's modus operandi is to first send a very small commercial drone to spy on IDF garrisons to see what forces are there, and then a few seconds later the kamikaze drone explodes,” Fenig said, using an acronym for the unmanned aerial vehicle.
“The damage is usually not that great because it's not a missile, but it's psychological. It shows that missiles can penetrate air defences and reach quite deep inside the border,” he said at the International Arms Exhibition in Paris.
Fenig said Tuesday's drone footage of Haifa port was likely just the latest in a series of similar incidents and was only made public because “people actually saw it in the air” and because Hezbollah was promoting it as part of its psychological warfare.
Liran Antebi, who studies the relationship between technology and defense at the Institute for National Security Studies, a nonpartisan think tank in Tel Aviv, said drones' simplicity is why they have been considered a low priority for Israel's highly tech-savvy military for more than a decade.
Israel is now in the middle of an arms race, but what were once thought of as small or paramilitary organizations are showing signs of change and becoming surprisingly effective, she said. “Israel's enemies often come at us with low-tech or no-tech, so Israel has to respond not necessarily with technology alone, but with a true understanding of the threat.”
In a Hamas-led attack on October 7, thousands of militants stormed the Israeli border using explosive-laden drones, destroying surveillance cameras, sensors and automatic machine guns along Israel's southern border fence that was previously thought to be impenetrable.
The attack killed more than 1,200 Israelis and took about 250 hostages. Over the next eight months, Israeli retaliatory air and ground attacks killed more than 37,000 Gazans, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which did not distinguish between combatants and civilians but said the majority of the victims were women and children.
Experts say a war with Lebanon could be even more deadly for both Israel and Lebanon, given the number and type of weapons involved.
After Israel killed Hezbollah's top commander last week, the group fired its largest volley of rockets and drones into Israel since October, sparking wildfires that scorched 11,000 acres of land. On Saturday, Hezbollah fired an anti-tank missile at the IDF's main air control base on Mount Meron. Two days later, Israel killed a “key operative” in Hezbollah's rocket and missile forces. Cross-border attacks have continued unabated.
But the biggest test of Israel's air defenses came in April when Iran retaliated for the April bombing of its embassy in Damascus, Syria, that killed two senior Revolutionary Guard commanders. Iran, along with its regional allies, fired hundreds of cruise and ballistic missiles at Israel and launched hundreds of explosive drones.
Israel escaped largely unscathed, except for one girl who was seriously injured by shrapnel, but it also got help: the US-led regional coalition provided significant assistance in shooting down many of the incoming bullets.
Israeli startup CEO Fennig said the Iranian attack was also a one-time event, raising questions about Israel's ability to handle or tolerate a more sustained attack. He said that in a post-October 7 world, Israel and its allies will need to leverage military technology to deal with a new generation of non-traditional and sometimes contradictory threats.
“Just because you have power and a budget doesn't give you an advantage,” he said. “There's no single solution on a dramatically changing battlefield. Everything is very problematic.”
