 "How Hezbollah drones breached Israel’s sophisticated defences and hit its military camp")
The conflict between Israel and Hezbollah is raging on. Even though several top leaders of the militant group have been eliminated in the past two weeks, it continues to hit back at Israel. On late Sunday, Hezbollah launched a drone strike targeting an army base in the northern part of the Jewish nation. Four soldiers were killed and more than 60 were injured in what is said to be one of the deadliest attacks since the war started last October.
While the Lebanon-based militia has been launching rockets and drones at Israel, it’s rare to surpass the Israeli defence system and cause damage. So what went wrong this time?
We look at Hezbollah’s recent attack and its growing drone power.
Hezbollah’s drone attack in Binyamina
Hezbollah attacked the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) military training camp in Binyamina near Haifa. With four soldiers killed and 61 injured, it is the deadliest such assault on an Israeli base since September 23, when Israel increased its attack on the militant group in Lebanon.
Claiming responsibility for the attack, Hezbollah said that it targeted the training camp of IDF’s Golani Brigade. The strike, the armed group’s media office said, was in response to Israeli attacks in Beirut and southern Lebanon on Thursday that killed 22 people and injured 117. It said it used a “swarm of drones” to target the camp, which is based between Haifa and Tel Aviv in northern Israel.
Impact Shorts
More ShortsThe claim by Hezbollah came shortly after it released an audio message from its slain chief Hassan Nasrallah calling its members to “defend your people, your family, your nation, your values and your dignity”.
According to the IDF, an unnamed aerial vehicle or UAV hit the army camp. Apart from the four soldiers, seven suffered severe injuries.
The Israeli ambulance service, Magen David Adom (MDA), said that 37 of those injured were taken to eight regional hospitals by ambulance or helicopter.
Breaching the Israeli defence systems
Israel has sophisticated air defence systems that help intercept projectiles. However, on Sunday, there were reportedly no alerts in the Binyamina area at the time of the attack. This has raised questions about how the Hezbollah drones breached Israeli territory and caused fatalities.
Hezbollah claimed that it fired a barrage of rockets toward Nahrariya and Acre, towns in northern Israel, to keep Israel’s air defence systems engaged and launched a swarm of drones at the same time. “These drones broke through the Israel defence radars without detection and reached its target at the training camp of the elite Golani Brigade in Binyamina,” the militant group said.
A Times of Israel report claims that Hezbollah launched two drones that entered the Israeli airspace from the sea. They were the Mirsad drones – Mirsad 1 – which the militant group has deployed for over two decades and is said to be their main suicide drone.
The drone is based on an Iranian design, the Mohajer-2 model, according to experts from the Alma Research Centre, an Israeli institute. It has a “120-kilometre assault range, a top speed of 370 kilometres per hour, the capacity to carry up to 40 kilogrammes of explosives, and the ability to fly at altitudes of up to 3,000 metres.”
In the Binyamina attack, the two drones were tracked by the Israeli radars. One was shot off the coast north of Haifa and sirens went off in the western Galilee area, reports The Times of Israel.
The Israel Air Force planes and choppers went after the second drone but they lost track of it as it dropped off the radar. This was because it flew very close to the ground. The sirens did not go off, as the military assumed it had crashed or was intercepted. That drone then struck the camp.
IDF spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said that the military would investigate how the drone entered without raising an alarm at the base. “We will learn from and investigate the incident,” he said in a video statement. “The threat of UAVs is a threat we are dealing with since the beginning of the war. We need an improvement to our defence.”
While Israel’s Iron Dome is effective against rockets, it has faced challenges in detecting low-flying Hezbollah drones like the Mirsad-1.
Hezbollah’s growing drone power
The drone war between Hezbollah and Israel has been ongoing for decades now. Over the years, the militant group has been arming itself with more sophisticated UAVs to take on Israel.
The drones can enter, surveil and attack enemy territory more discreetly than missiles and rockets. Hezbollah has been increasingly using them to overwhelm the Israeli air defence systems. While the Iron Dome and David’s Sling guard against enemy rocket and missile arsenal, the focus on drone threat has been less.
“It is a threat that has to be taken seriously,” Fabian Hinz, a research fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said of Hezbollah’s drone capability. “And as a result, there has been less effort to build defensive capabilities” against drones, he added.
While Israel has intercepted hundreds of drones from Lebanon during the Israel-Hamas war since October last year, its air defence systems are not hermetic, an Israeli security official told The Associated Press (AP) in August. Drones are smaller and slower than missiles and rockets and therefore harder to stop. That’s especially true when they are launched from close to the border and require a shorter reaction time to intercept.
The official, who was not authorised to speak publicly in line with Israeli security restrictions, said Israeli air defence systems have had to contend with more drones during this war than ever before, and Israel responded by attacking launch points.
Sunday’s attack is not the first time Mirsad-1 has breached Israel’s defences. A similar incident occurred earlier in the year when Hezbollah drones flew over Israeli territory for several minutes before returning to Lebanon without being detected, The Jerusalem Post reports.
In mid-May, Hezbollah launched one of its deepest strikes into Israel in mid-May, using an explosive drone that scored a direct hit on one of Israel’s most significant air force surveillance systems. Since the increasing tensions between the two sides following the 7 October Hamas attack last year, Hezbollah has also sent surveillance drones that filmed vital facilities in Israel’s north, including in Haifa, its suburbs and the Ramat David Airbase, southeast of the coastal city.
In its early days, Hezbollah used paragliders and other lower-tech tactics, including paragliders, to attack enemy lines. After Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000 after an 18-year occupation, Hezbollah began using Iranian-made drones and sent the first reconnaissance Mirsad drone over Israel’s airspace in 2004, reports AP. The militant group increased its use of drones during its involvement in the Syria conflict.
While Hezbollah first depended on Iran-made drones, it now claims to manufacture its own drones. The drone programme still receives substantial assistance from Iran, and the UAVs are believed to be assembled by experts of the militant group in Lebanon. The group depends on parts from Western countries – there is a network in Europe and around the world that supplies Hezbollah with parts to build explosive drones. These include electronic guidance components, propulsion propellers, gasoline engines, and more than 200 electric motors and materials for the fuselage, wings, and other drone parts, according to investigators.
Over the years, Hezbollah’s drone power has grown from strength to strength and Israel, though the more powerful side, cannot dismiss this.
With inputs from agencies
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