The IDF believes Hamas is operating fiber-optic guided drones inside the Gaza Strip, similar to the weapons Hezbollah has used to inflict mounting casualties on Israeli troops in southern Lebanon, a Southern Command officer told the Israeli news site Walla.

The officer said the military is preparing for scenarios that could involve fiber-optic drone strikes, parachute-deployed gliders and rocket barrages from Gaza, even as the army does not currently see indications of an imminent escalation or of plans to deploy the weapons against Israeli civilians or troops in the near term.

The assessment underscores a problem the IDF has openly acknowledged for months: more than two and a half years after the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led massacre and despite intensive domestic and foreign efforts to engineer countermeasures, the military still has no complete answer to fiber-optic drones. The aircraft are guided by a thin spool of cable that unspools as the drone flies, immunizing them from electronic jamming and giving them a vanishingly small radar and electromagnetic signature. Closing that operational gap, the officer told Walla, remains one of the toughest challenges on the IDF’s threat list.

Fiber-optic drones are first-person view aircraft, often weighing as little as a kilogram, that can carry warheads several times their own weight. They are built largely from off-the-shelf components, can be produced in the thousands at low cost, and can be flown out to roughly 20 kilometers from their operator. The technology was sharpened in the Syrian war and refined extensively in the Russia-Ukraine conflict before spreading across the region.

Walla reported that Hamas used fiber-optic drones during the opening minutes of the October 7 attack to blind the IDF’s Gaza Division by knocking out border observation systems. Subsequent investigations concluded that Hamas smuggled the aircraft into Gaza with Iranian and Hezbollah assistance and that operators were trained on the technology in Lebanon. Israeli military intelligence had identified the developing threat in advance but was still caught off guard by the precision with which Hamas employed it on October 7, according to earlier Israeli press reports.

In the north, Hezbollah has used the same class of weapon to deadly effect since the Lebanon war reignited on March 2. The group recently released footage showing first-person view drones striking an Iron Dome battery and its maintenance crew at the Jal al-Alam site, and it has steadily attacked Israeli armored vehicles, observation posts and individual soldiers along the frontier. Master Sgt. Alexander Glovanyov, 47, killed in a drone strike near the Lebanese border earlier this month, was the 18th IDF soldier to die in the current Lebanon war.

The IDF Ground Forces Command, under Maj. Gen. Nadav Lotan, established seven dedicated task forces in late April to compress the timeline for fielding countermeasures. The teams are working on revised combat doctrine, detection and interception systems, electromagnetic spectrum tools and passive defenses including armor and netting. Israel has ordered thousands of crates of 5.56mm fragmenting ammunition from the United States, and is rolling out computer-vision fire control sights that can be mounted on standard assault rifles to give individual soldiers a better chance of hitting a small, fast-moving aerial target. In southern Lebanon, troops have begun routinely draping mesh nets over parked vehicles to absorb final-stage strikes.

The Southern Command officer indicated that any solution developed for the northern theater would have to translate quickly into Gaza, where the same threat is now assumed to be present and waiting.

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)