ReutersFibre-optic drones have become Hezbollah’s primary weapon against Israeli soldiers and civilians, along both sides of the Lebanese border, and are now seen as the biggest threat there, as fighting continues six weeks into a supposed ceasefire.
One Israeli soldier was killed and two others injured in a drone attack near the Israeli border community of Shomera on Wednesday.
Of the 11 Israeli soldiers and one civilian defence contractor killed since the ceasefire came into force, eight have been killed by fibre-optic drones.
Most of the attacks have targeted Israeli forces, which are currently occupying a large area of southern Lebanon, but Hezbollah is also increasingly attacking Israeli communities across the border, according to the Alma Research Center, an Israeli think tank which monitors the conflict.
In Shomera, a leafy town at the western end of the border, drone attacks have left trails of fibre-optic wires along the roads – and a new sense of fear in this battle-hardened community.
“The problem is you don’t feel them coming. You’re sitting there, and suddenly it arrives,” said Shomera’s council chief, Sami Zanetti. “And if you run away, it follows you.”
He showed me a bus-stop, scarred by a recent drone attack this week that struck minutes after a school bus had left.
The fibre-optic drones used by Hezbollah – also known as First-Person View or FPVs – are much harder to detect than the rockets and mortars this town is used to. The drones are loaded with explosives and fly low, without a radio signal that can be jammed by Israel’s military. They are connected to their operators by a thin optical wire, which allow them to see and chase targets on the ground. It’s a tactic learned from the war in Ukraine.
Several times a day, sirens sound in these frontier communities, warning of a drone crossing the border from Lebanon. Here, the warnings and the weapons come seconds apart; sometimes there’s no warning at all.
“With rockets, I’ve got 15 seconds to go into a bomb shelter. With drones, you have no way of knowing when it will fall,” Sami Zanetti said.
As we were talking, sirens erupted.
The alerts on our phones said a drone had been spotted, heading straight for Shomera.
From inside the public bomb shelter, we scan the sky.
Israel’s army sometimes intercepts drones that cross the border, but also often loses contact with the small, low-flying devices.
This time in Shomera, the attack never arrives.
But the road we’re standing in is strewn with the fine silvery filaments left from previous drone strikes.
Just the day before, members of the community’s security team were filmed chasing and firing at a drone flying along this street, right next to the house of Amichai Ben David, a peach and nectarine farmer with seven children.
“[The drone] came and we rushed into the house,” he told me. “The soldiers outside shot at it, and managed to knock it out of the air. They saved us, thank god.”
Amichai has lived here all his life. His home has a large hole in the roof where a rocket hit the family home last year. But the drones are a new and different threat, he says.
“The missiles stopped because of the ceasefire – and the drones started coming instead. They have cameras attached – if there’s a soldier in uniform, or they don’t like the look of someone, it simply drops and explodes.”
The Alma Research Center says Israel’s military assessment is that Hezbollah has dozens of trained drone operators and that it has accumulated a significant stockpile of the small, cheaply-made drones, which cost around $300-$400 each.
“They intensified the amount of attacks across the border inside Israel,” said Sarit Zehavi, who heads the center. “And I think that’s a direct order from Iran, against the background of what is happening with the [US] deal. Iran wants to see a situation where Israel is attacking Hezbollah, and everything explodes, and goes back to the beginning.”
“[Hezbollah’s] goal is to harm as many lives as possible, and when they see that Israeli soldiers are finding more ways to protect themselves physically, then they try to harm civilians in civilian communities,” said Capt Adi Stoler, a spokesperson for Israel’s military. “They go outside more, they live their life, take their children to school, and if [Hezbollah] can harm them while they’re doing that, that’s what they’ll do.”
Israel’s military chief of staff has reportedly called for attacks on “buildings in Beirut”, in response to Hezbollah’s growing use of explosive drones.
“For every drone that harms one of our soldiers,” the far-right Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich said, Israeli forces should “bring down 100 buildings” in Hezbollah’s southern Beirut stronghold.
Earlier this week, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to deal Hezbollah “a crushing blow”.
“It is true they are launching drones at us,” he said. “We have a special team working on this, and we will solve this.”
Israeli forces have been criticized for being slow to learn from the experience of troops in Ukraine, who have battled the threat of fibre-optic drones launched by Russia for the past two years.
Sarit Zehavi said Alma’s researchers had warned in 2024 about fibre-optic drones becoming the next threat from Hezbollah.
“We knew this was coming because it was obvious Hezbollah would adopt the methods from Ukraine and that as we had success at intercepting rockets and became better in intercepting UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles], that FPVs were next.”
“It’s a tactical problem that Israel is dealing with, it’s not something we see as an existential threat,” said the IDF’s Adi Stoler. “But yes, these type of drones are a challenge for us. It is something we’re trying to solve as soon as possible.”
Moose Campbell/BBCAn Israeli military official admitted that the primary bottleneck in combatting the threat came from “gaps in weapons development”.
“The response is not hermetic, and capabilities for detection and interception must continue to be developed,” the official said, adding that countering drones was now a “central mission” for the Israel Defense Forces’ Northern Command, with significant resources being invested.
Learning from troops in Ukraine, Israeli forces have begun covering their positions with netting to entrap and tangle the tiny drones.
And several Israeli defence companies are working on new ways to defeat Hezbollah’s drone warfare.
According to the Alma Research Center, they include an advanced interceptor drone, specialist fragmenting anti-drone ammunition, and automatic firing systems with electro-optical sensors.
In one project being developed by the Israeli company, Smart Shooter, a sensor continuously scans the environment, sending information to a computer mounted on a soldier’s personal weapon, which can then analyse the threat, lock onto a target, and give the soldier a firing window.
But Israel’s widely-read daily newspaper, Israel Hayom, says the defensive systems developed so far are falling short, and that Israel’s preferred military option for now, the paper says, is to destroy the drones in warehouses or eliminate operators before launch.
Earlier this week, the IDF put out a video showing what it says is a strike on an operator retrieving a drone in southern Lebanon.
The race to adapt on the battlefield has been sharpened by a parallel public relations war.
Hezbollah regularly releases edited footage of what it says are drone attacks on Israeli targets, underlaid with doom-laden music.
One video released this week was apparently filmed from a Hezbollah drone as it flew towards a military vehicle full of Israeli troops in the Lebanese village of Bint Jbeil. It ends with two soldiers leaping from the truck as the drone flies straight into it.
On Wednesday, the IDF issued more evacuation notices for villages, towns and cities in southern Lebanon, culminating in a sweeping evacuation order for the whole of the country below the Zahrani river, which runs around 40km from the border.
Israel has also continued bombing targets across Lebanon, and clearing areas it says are being used by Hezbollah fighters in the south.
In Shomera, there are calls to go further, despite the political restrictions supposedly imposed by Israel’s ceasefire agreement with the Lebanese government, and the constraints of current efforts of US president Donald Trump, to reach a ceasefire deal with Hezbollah’s backer, Iran.
“How do we stop this? Go deeper into Lebanon, with a very strong attack,” the peach farmer Amichai Ben David told me.
Sami Zanetti, the council chief, said he wanted either a “real peace” with Hezbollah or all-out war.
“I would like the country to take a brave decision, and clear out the terrorists once and for all. Finish off Hezbollah,” he told me. “Today, our hands are tied by US President Trump.”
