Sunday, November 03, 2024

Israel’s Hezbollah “drone dilemma”

 By Wesam Bahrani

TEHRAN- Hezbollah has shown its capability to launch long-range drones at sensitive Israeli sites creating a headache for the military strategists in Tel Aviv.

Over the past months, Hezbollah has waged frequent drone launches from Lebanon, which have managed to evade Israeli air defense systems, reaching the heart of the occupying regime. 

The Hebrew site Walla published a report on the “drone dilemma,” stating that the Lebanese resistance and others have managed to identify one of the major weaknesses of the Israeli occupation forces and its ability to handle the threat of drones. 

The report mentioned that, throughout this year, drones have been able to hit precise targets, including the dining hall at the Golani Brigade training base, the home of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a building in Nahariya, and various occupation army sites. 

The drone strike on the elite Golani Brigade’s training base in Binyamina led to dozens of casualties among the Brigade’s troops as well as at least four fatalities. 

The timing and accuracy were also significant. The drone struck at the same time as the troops were having dinner and directly hit the base’s dining hall. 

The strike on Netanyahu’s private residence, which hit the Israeli Premier’s bedroom further highlighted that Hezbollah is in possession of precise intelligence on the most sensitive Israeli targets. 

The Israeli army has “zero solutions” for Hezbollah drones that have become “sitting ducks”On Saturday and Sunday alone, 10 drones were launched toward the Israeli-occupied territories, with one intercepted in Lebanese airspace.

The Walla report further highlighted that Hezbollah’s Unit 127 is responsible for most drone launches toward the occupied territories, operating in a decentralized, secretive, and fragmented manner, making it very difficult to locate its members and launch sites, according to Israeli military sources.

Sources in the Israeli military industries told the Walla website, “We have got zero solutions for those drones, and the army was slow to realize they’re basically sitting ducks”.

Also on Sunday, Israeli Channel 12 aired footage of a drone in Israeli airspace launched from Lebanon. The Hebrew news outlets said, “There has been more than half an hour of warnings [without any interception]”. 

The video showed an Israeli combat helicopter chasing the Hezbollah drone.

Other videos that emerged on Sunday showed how a Hezbollah drone flying at high speed had the ability to change direction. The video showed the drones flight path taking a slight turn to the right.  

More footage revealed a Hezbollah drone flying above Israeli homes, while another unmanned aerial vehicle was intercepted by an Apache helicopter above Binyamina near Haifa, but only after flying all the way to central Israel.

On Saturday, Hezbollah targeted the Ramat David base and its airport with a swarm of one-way assault drones, achieving direct hits.

The Lebanese resistance fighters deployed a one-way attack drone targeting the 8200 Military Intelligence Unit's Glilot base, achieving a direct hit.

Hezbollah also bombarded the Shraga base, north of Acre also known as Akka, with a swarm of one-way drones.

Meanwhile, the resistance movement published a video on Sunday in Hebrew, with Arabic subtitles. 

The video contained a small collection of different social media videos taken by Israeli settlers of Hezbollah’s drones. The settlers are heard saying in Hebrew, “Look look’’, “A drone, a drone!”, “Oh God”, “How come the helicopter is not catching it?”, “Here it is!”, “Here is the drone. God knows where it is going”.

Hezbollah appears to have tapped into the Israeli military’s weakness to shoot down the swarm of drones being launched from southern Lebanon and is using it in the psychological warfare being waged by Tel Aviv and the Lebanese resistance.    

Meanwhile, a drone infiltrated from Syria and flew for more than ten minutes in the skies of the occupied Golan Heights. Contact with it was lost without any Israeli defense system being able to intercept it. The drone may have originated from Iraq. 

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