As the IDF continues to grapple with Hezbollah’s explosive drone threat, a military intelligence assessment shows that Hezbollah currently has about 100 trained drone operators, with fewer than 10 reportedly eliminated so far, Army Radio reported.

The IDF says it identified near the end of Operation Northern Arrows that Hezbollah had begun placing heavy emphasis on developing explosive drones. The terror organization used the year-and-three-month ceasefire period to acquire and assemble explosive drones and train terrorists to use them.

In June 2025, the IDF reportedly carried out a broad wave of strikes across Lebanon targeting numerous drone and UAV production workshops.

Unlike Hezbollah’s aerial Unit 127, which mainly operates UAVs, the organization’s explosive-drone operators are dispersed across various units in southern Lebanon, including Radwan Force units. IDF officials say this decentralized structure makes the operators more difficult to target because there is no single command responsible for the entire drone program.

IDF officials estimate Hezbollah has around 100 qualified explosive-drone operators. Since operating fiber-optic-guided drones requires specialized training, not every Hezbollah terrorist is capable of using them.

Israeli officials believe that because the number of qualified operators is relatively limited, intelligence and operational efforts should focus primarily on locating and eliminating them. According to military assessments, targeting the operators themselves could at least temporarily suppress one of the most troubling threats facing the IDF.

So far, however, only between five and ten operators are believed to have been killed.

“That’s not enough,” a senior officer said. “We are making technological and intelligence efforts to locate the drone operators and strike them. Their numbers are finite—they are the bottleneck.”

According to the report, Hezbollah is continuing efforts to train additional operators even now.

Because the fiber-optic cables used by most Hezbollah explosive drones are generally between 10 and 15 kilometers long, most operators are believed to operate south of the Litani River but north of the Yellow Line—outside the Israeli-controlled security zone in southern Lebanon.

Still, the IDF does not rule out the possibility that in some cases, Hezbollah terrorists manage to infiltrate the security zone itself to launch drones deeper into Israeli territory.

The military is also investigating one of the most serious drone strikes of the war after Hezbollah published footage allegedly showing a strike on an Iron Dome battery. Israeli military officials confirmed that such a strike did occur, but said it did not create any “operational gap” in northern Israel’s air-defense system.

(YWN Israel Desk—Jerusalem)