‘A Rubik’s Cube in the Sky’: Israel Struggles to Defend Against Drones
An attack on Tel Aviv attributed to Yemen’s Houthis exposes a hole in Israel’s high-tech air defenses
KIRYAT SHMONA, Israel—On Friday, Israel’s vaunted aerial-defense system tracked 65 rockets fired across its northern border by the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, intercepting some and letting the rest fall harmlessly into open areas.
That same day, Israel missed a single drone it believes flew more than 1,000 miles from Yemen to explode in the commercial capital Tel Aviv.
Israel has a problem with drones. They can be small and hard to detect, and they don’t move on predictable trajectories or emit the intense heat of rocket engines that make missiles easier to track and destroy. They are also cheap and plentiful, and are being deployed by the country’s adversaries in increasing numbers and sophistication.
Hezbollah has demonstrated the ability to strike Israel with drones in the near daily exchanges of fire since the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack in which Israeli authorities say 1,200 people were killed and some 250 were taken hostage, prompting Israel’s invasion of the Gaza Strip.
The group often sends several at once—at least one for reconnaissance and another rigged with explosives—and has hit border towns and military bases, killing and injuring civilians and soldiers. It also has hit sensitive military equipment—including a radar surveillance balloon called Sky Dew in May and a multimillion-dollar antidrone system called Drone Dome in June.
Goading the Israeli military, Hezbollah flew surveillance drones across northern Israel in recent months, collecting aerial images of sensitive sites and publishing them in an unsubtle reminder of Israel’s vulnerability.
The Iron Dome, Israel’s famed air-defense system, has struggled to cope with the challenge. The alternative has been to scramble jet fighters, a costly and potentially dangerous solution that forces pilots to fly low in mountainous areas and exposes them to Hezbollah’s antiaircraft systems.
When all else fails, Israeli soldiers are told to use their rifles, some of which have been rigged with technology that can make their shots more accurate, according to Israeli military and defense officials.
“UAVs have turned into the main threat in terms of our ability to deal with it, because the army right now has no means of prevention except using F-16s,” said Ariel Frisch, deputy security officer of Kiryat Shmona, an Israeli city near the border with Lebanon that has been hit by at least six explosive drones since Oct. 7. “We are very, very worried about it.”
Israel’s vulnerability to uncrewed aerial vehicles is a sign of the challenges it would face in any full-scale war with Hezbollah and the difficulty it will have ever feeling confident it has eliminated threats from the adversaries around its borders. It is a threat all modern armies are struggling with as their opponents make use of the fast advances in civilian technology to develop cheap and highly accurate weapons.
The drone that hit Tel Aviv early Friday morning was a large model that air-defense experts say should be easier to knock down. The Iran-backed Houthi militia in Yemen claimed responsibility for the attack, saying it used a new drone that can evade air-defense systems.
The drone approached from the Mediterranean Sea to the west and was identified by Israeli radar minutes before it struck, a senior Israeli air-force officer said Sunday. Those on duty needed to decide whether it was an Israeli drone, an allied aircraft, a civilian aircraft or even a flock of birds.
During the war, Israel has been focused on aerial attacks from the north, south and east—in fact, an enemy drone was coming in from the east at about the same time, and Israel shot it down. Complicating matters, the drone from Yemen was flying in on routes generally used by civilian aircraft, though at a much lower altitude, the officer said.
“All of this, on top of the humans in the process, unfortunately caused them to classify it not as a threat,” the officer said.
Just over a mile from the border with Lebanon, Kiryat Shmona today is a ghost town with dusty cars, abandoned homes and unraked leaves covering its streets. Most of its some 20,000 residents have been evacuated from their homes since the start of the fighting. Hezbollah has hit targets across northern Israel with rockets, antitank missiles and drones.
Hezbollah has launched about 1,000 drones at Israel since the beginning of the war, mainly targeting towns and military bases within 3 miles of the border, including Kiryat Shmona. Their use has increased sharply this year, and the militant group has exhibited an ability to learn and take advantage of blind spots in Israeli defenses by mapping northern Israel with its surveillance drones, said Sarit Zehavi, founder and president of Alma Research and Education Center, a think tank in Israel.
The group has an arsenal of at least 2,500 drones and the ability to assemble more from parts supplied by Iran, according to estimates by Alma.
Drones force militants’ stronger adversaries to allocate scarce and costly resources to defend against them. While the Iranian Ababil drones used by Hezbollah can cost $5,000 apiece, an hour of flight time for an F-16 shooting two missiles is roughly $45,000, said Yehoshua Kalinsky, a senior researcher at the Tel Aviv-based Institute for National Security Studies. An interception by the Iron Dome is even more expensive and can cost $100,000 or more.
Shooting down drones with a jet requires pilots to locate hard-to-detect devices and distinguish them from friendly drones, other warplanes and civilian aircraft. The drones have low heat signatures, so the jets need to get behind them and as close as possible for the heat-seeking missiles to engage, an Israeli air-force pilot said.
The combination of friendly or enemy drones and jets, civilian aircraft and birds is like “a Rubik’s Cube in the sky,” said an air-force officer involved in aerial threat detection.
Samuel Bendett, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, who studies drone warfare, said Israel could learn from Ukraine’s experience. After 2½ years of drone-intensive war with Russia, the country has developed more cost-effective solutions for detecting and intercepting them.
They include spreading acoustic sensors throughout the country to pick up the sound of drone motors. Ukraine also has established specialized truck-mounted mobile defense units armed with large-caliber machine guns, projector lights and electronic warfare systems that are then dispatched to intercept approaching drones.
Israel’s defense system has known about the drone threat for years, but hasn’t developed effective solutions in time, said Liran Antebi, a senior researcher also at the Institute for National Security Studies, who has been warning about the threat since 2013.
“Israel underestimated the size of the threat, the amounts of the systems in the hands of the other side and its willingness to operate them,” she said.
llan Bitton, the former head of Israel’s air defenses in the air force and a former senior official at Israel Aerospace Industries, said drones for years were seen as a “side issue”—not a big enough threat to divert resources from efforts to counter rockets and missiles.
Solutions have been late in coming, but Bitton was optimistic that Israel will create a multilayered defense against drones within one to three years. Israel’s Ministry of Defense has now allocated larger sums to the task and is working with big defense companies and new technology outfits. A new accelerator program for Israeli startups lists sensors to detect small aircrafts as one of the ministry’s areas of interest.
One highly expected response is the “Iron Beam,” which will fire a concentrated laser to take down aerial threats. A defense official said it would be rolled out sometime in 2025. The energy used for each interception is expected to cost a dollar or two per target, significantly cheaper than using interceptor missiles.
Still, the system has its weaknesses. Its effectiveness goes down in bad weather, and it can only shoot down one threat at a time, when adversaries are expected to attack with swarms. Israeli defense officials said it would need to be integrated into a multitiered defense system similar to what Israel now uses against rockets and missiles.
Moshik Cohen, an Israeli tech entrepreneur who previously worked on defense-missiles development at the Israel Aerospace Industries and autonomous vehicles at Samsung, is now working on building a platform to detect and classify threats, such as drones and UAVs, so they can be shot down. But he is aware that the drones are improving quickly as well. Israel is in a technology race, he said, not a typical arms race, and doesn’t have the advantage of time.
“This is an agile, software-defined conflict,” Cohen said. “If something is evolving, you need to evolve and move faster to win. Otherwise, you have no chance. You don’t have three years for development.”