As the Israel-Hezbollah conflict in Lebanon continues to loom large over U.S.-Iran peace talks, one issue in particular has emerged as a driving force behind the fight—the militant group’s use of explosive first-person-view (FPV) drones against Israeli forces.
Drawing lessons from the devastating use of FPV drones in the Russia-Ukraine war, Hezbollah has used these weapons to inflict serious damage and casualties on the Israeli military, which has been scrambling to find an effective response.
The drones are a “gold mine” for the Iran-backed militant group, said an Israeli military official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the issue. “They have a cheap weapon [that is] not very hard to operate and [is] deadly to the other side. And the other side so far hasn’t been able to find a solution to it. Therefore they can keep using it, and our defense will be mostly reactive to it, using nets or shotguns or shelters. As long as we don’t have a solution, they will continue to use those FPV drones,” the official added.
Israel has pointed to Hezbollah’s drones as one of the key reasons that Israeli forces moved farther into Lebanon and are continuing to conduct operations and strikes in the country. “Because of drones launched against us, we had to move the yellow line,” the official said, referring to the boundary that marks the buffer zone that Israel has established in southern Lebanon. “We’ll always have to retaliate against those types of threats against us.”
People are seen at the beach against the backdrop of smoke rising from the site of an Israeli strike near the southern Lebanese city of Tyre on May 27.Kawant Haju/AFP via Getty Images
The Trump administration is working to keep the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah from upending the peace process with Iran. Tehran has been adamant that any agreements with Washington include a cessation of hostilities in Lebanon. But neither Israel nor Hezbollah is party to the U.S.-Iran memorandum of understanding signed in mid-June, and they have continued to fight—even after Israel and Lebanon announced a cease-fire on April 16 and Israel and Hezbollah a truce on June 19.
Between April 17 and June 20, Hezbollah conducted 1,163 attacks on Israel and Israel Defense Forces (IDF) troops; 637 of them involved drones, accounting for nearly 55 percent of all attacks during that period, according to Alma, an Israeli research center specializing in security threats in northern Israel.
The drone threat is among the reasons that the Israeli public is pushing its government to ignore calls from Washington to de-escalate and to instead ramp up the fight. Israelis in the north of the country near the border with Lebanon, who have borne the brunt of Hezbollah’s attacks, are especially concerned about this.
Sarit Zehavi, the founder and president of Alma, lost a relative—IDF Staff Sgt. Noam Hamburger, the son of her cousin—to a Hezbollah drone attack in May that occurred on Israeli territory. “He was killed by an FPV on the Israeli side of the border,” Zehavi said. “It was a month before he was supposed to end his military service. He was 23 years old.”
“From a personal point of view, yes, it hurts. But from a national point of view, I can say that I’m more worried about the potential of what may happen if we [do] not stop the rehabilitation of Hezbollah, and the FPV [drones] are part of that, of course,” Zehavi said.
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz in April said the disarmament of Hezbollah was Israel’s top military objective in Lebanon. But Hezbollah’s success in exploiting explosive drones has given the militant group a newfound sense of confidence—and even more reasons to refuse to lay down its arms. During a speech in May, Hezbollah Secretary-General Naim Qassem said the group’s FPV drones had made Israel “dizzy” as he rejected calls for disarmament.
“This whole thing has totally revitalized Hezbollah’s resistance narrative, its resistance mojo,” said Nicholas Blanford, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who’s based in Beirut and is an expert on Hezbollah. “After the 2006 war, Hezbollah used to talk about the ‘last war’ with Israel. There’d be one final confrontation, one side would prevail, and that would be it. And I asked this guy—he’s a veteran—‘Is this the last war with Israel?’ And he said, ‘Yes, it is. We’re all in on this one.’”
Hezbollah has demanded that Israeli troops withdraw from southern Lebanon, but Israel has said it will not fully withdraw until its security concerns are addressed—and has tied this to the drone issue.
“As long as I am prime minister, we will maintain the security zone in southern Lebanon,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said last week. “We will be the first in the world to solve the explosive drones problem.”
Israel on Friday agreed to withdraw troops from two areas in southern Lebanon under a deal with the Lebanese government brokered by the United States. But the deal conditions a full withdrawal of Israeli forces on Hezbollah’s disarmament.
With Hezbollah refusing to disarm and Israel rejecting a complete withdrawal from Lebanon until this occurs, the conflict is poised to continue on some level for the foreseeable future. Since the fighting began back in early March, 37 Israeli troops and four Israeli civilians have been killed.
While Israel portrays Hezbollah’s drones as a significant problem for its military and civilian population, there’s also no hiding from the fact that the conflict with Hezbollah has had a disproportionate impact in Lebanon. Israeli airstrikes have caused devastation across the country, from the ancient port city of Tyre to the capital of Beirut. In Lebanon, over 4,200 people have been killed, more than 12,000 have been wounded, and over a million people (roughly 20 percent of the population) have been displaced.
Hezbollah and Israel both appear prepared for a long fight, even as the Trump administration facilitates talks and agreements between the Israeli and Lebanese governments aimed at ending the conflict. “We are not retreating,” Katz said last week, vowing that Israel would not withdraw from the security zone in southern Lebanon “even if there is an American demand.”
Israeli emergency workers attend the scene after a drone reportedly fired from Lebanon hit a structure in Caesarea, Israel, a town where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu maintains a private residence, on Oct. 19, 2024. Amir Levy/Getty Images
Hezbollah has been using drones for years. In 2024, for example, the group claimed responsibility for a drone attack on Netanyahu’s private residence in the coastal town of Caesarea. But Hezbollah dramatically ramped up its reliance on explosive, one-way drones since renewed fighting broke out between the group and Israel in March amid the Iran war.
This has marked a significant tactical shift for Hezbollah and has emerged as one of the most serious challenges for Israel in the conflict. After the fighting resumed in March, it wasn’t long before explosive drones were a leading cause of battlefield deaths for Israel in Lebanon. As a result, Netanyahu established a team of experts to address the issue and pledged to give the IDF an unlimited budget to address the Hezbollah drone threat. But there are no simple solutions.
Hezbollah has a variety of drones in its arsenal, including long-range unmanned aerial vehicles capable of striking targets across Israel, but FPV drones controlled through fiber-optic cables have become one of the group’s most preferred weapons in the fight.
“In the previous round, 2023-2024, Hezbollah was using drones but mainly the fixed-wing drones for attacks into Israel and against the Israeli positions. But this time around, they’re using FPV drones in large numbers,” Blanford said. “They’re cheap and easy to produce. They’re effective and can be produced to scale. They’re not really weapons systems that would need to be smuggled in, like anti-tank missiles or land mines or rockets. You can smuggle them in as civilian components quite legally through Beirut ports and other ports and simply assemble them here and weaponize them here. And that’s essentially what Hezbollah has done.”
The fiber-optic drones Hezbollah uses have a more limited range than their wireless counterparts—roughly 9 to 12 miles—but they have the advantage of being immune to electronic jamming (they have no radio signal and don’t depend on GPS) and are able to evade Israel’s Iron Dome air defense system.
“A lot of countries around the world are suffering from these types of drones. The major problem is the drones that bypass GPS systems. Non-fiber-optic drones that have been launched into Israel were mostly intercepted by the Iron Dome. But the Iron Dome cannot intercept those fiber-optic drones. The amount of money that Hezbollah puts into getting and manufacturing those drones is not even close to how much one Iron Dome interceptor costs,” the Israeli military official said.
The drones cost roughly $300 to $400 and are assembled via a combination of 3D-printed materials and commercially available components. Hezbollah loads explosives onto them and crashes them into targets that operators guide them to via video feed.
“Fiber-optic gives you stable, high-quality video feed. Over a long distance, it’s like there’s no latency. Drone pilots who manage to fly 15 kilometers [about 9 miles], they’ve got to factor in latency with radio frequency video feed. And it might not be much. But again, it could impact the accuracy of the device,” said Robert Tollast, a researcher in the land warfare team at the Royal United Services Institute, a U.K.-based security and defense think tank.
Fiber-optic drones are also lightweight and easy to transport. “You could put a bunch of these things in the back of a car. You don’t even need a pickup truck. So it’s a really good guerrilla weapon,” Tollast said. He noted that “the ambush aspect is really critical” because the drones “can fly very low without losing signal and basically creep up on unsuspecting forces.”
Fiber-optic drones aren’t perfect. Their wires can get tangled, they have a smaller warhead than other drones, and they can take longer to set up. Environmental factors such as humidity or extreme cold can also cause problems for the cable, causing it to stick together. “These are really small drawbacks, though. Obviously, for Hezbollah, they’ve realized pretty quickly that this is a really good capability to have,” Tollast said.
Explosions from projectile interceptions by Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense over Tel Aviv on Feb. 28.Jack Guez/AFP via Getty Images
In ancient Rome, gladiators used nets to entangle opponents before moving in for the kill. Today, Israeli troops are using the same primitive tool to defend against drones and intercept them before they reach their targets. The situation is indicative of how militaries have struggled to find countermeasures to drones and have been forced to adapt, particularly as the technology evolves at such a rapid pace.
The Israeli military is also using shotguns to take the drones down and has begun using artificial intelligence-assisted gunsights developed by an Israeli start-up called Smart Shooter. And the country’s defense industry is working on other solutions, including laser-based systems.
On the battlefield, the Israeli military has sought to kill drone operators, tracking them down by tracing the thin optical wire connected to the drone. But this isn’t a foolproof method, and drone operators can be replaced—although it does take time to train them. “We’re talking 30 solid days of training, in some cases, to make a good pilot,” Tollast said. “For the aces in Ukraine, the guys that are really good, they’ve been working after their training for months and months and months.”
These measures are meant to help the IDF improve its intercept rate. But for Israeli communities in the line of fire, if even a few drones penetrate Israel’s defenses, it’s “enough to truly cause a problem,” Zehavi said.
The Israeli military has said the Hezbollah drone threat is a tactical problem, but Zehavi said there needs to be a strategic solution. “The strategic solution [is] to make sure that Hezbollah is not rebuilding its power, that it is constantly under pressure, military pressure by Israel everywhere in Lebanon and political and financial pressure by the Lebanese government and by the international community,” she said.
Israeli police check the site of a Hezbollah explosive drone attack near the northern city of Nahariya, on Aug. 6, 2024.Menahem Kahana/AFP via Getty Images
Given all that has been learned about the lethal effectiveness of drones in the Ukraine war since Russia’s invasion in 2022, questions have been raised as to why Israel was not better prepared for the Hezbollah drone threat. “It’s one of the most surprising things of this conflict that the Israelis weren’t more prepared for this eventuality. It was pretty clear that Hezbollah would have been following extremely closely the conflict in Ukraine and learning lessons from it,” Blanford said.
When asked whether Israel was unprepared for this threat, the Israeli military official said, “My short answer is ‘yes.’ My longer answer is that Israel did not sit on its hands for the past two and a half years. We had so many situations and threats to deal with. We could have been better prepared if the situation was different.”
“Throughout the war, the many drones and projectiles launched against Israel were intercepted almost at 100 percent of success by us,” the official added. “But our enemy is adjusting to the situation.”