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Deadly Hezbollah Strike on Army Base Shows Israel’s Weakness Against Drones

Israel has one of the world’s best defenses against missiles and rockets, but struggles to detect slower-moving unmanned aircraft, experts said.

Cabins line a road in a rural area.
Military facilities near the site of a drone attack outside Binyamina, Israel, on Monday.Credit...Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times

Patrick Kingsley and

Reporting from Israel

Minutes before a deadly Hezbollah drone strike on an army base in northern Israel this weekend, Israeli police officers notified the Air Force about reports of a suspicious aircraft, the police said. They were told not to worry because the aircraft was Israeli, prompting the officers to close the case.

The Air Force’s assessment appeared to be wrong: Moments later, four Israeli soldiers were killed and dozens more were wounded in the Hezbollah attack, the latest of several recent drone strikes that have highlighted weaknesses in the way that Israel detects unmanned aircraft.

In July, the Houthi militia in Yemen hit an apartment building in Tel Aviv, killing one civilian. Hezbollah last week hit a nursing home north of Tel Aviv, causing damage but no casualties. Earlier in the year, Hezbollah broadcast footage that was captured by a drone that flew over sensitive installations in Haifa, seemingly without being detected.

The latest strike, on a training base south of the Israeli city of Haifa, highlighted how Hezbollah retains the ability to hurt Israel despite devastating Israeli attacks on its leadership and infrastructure. It also pointed up Israel’s defensive shortcomings, prompting the Israeli military to launch an investigation and its chief spokesman to acknowledge on Sunday: “We must provide better defense.”

One of the civilians who spotted the drone, Viki Kadosh, said she was “so frustrated, because 10 minutes before the hit, we had called in to warn about it.” Speaking on Monday to Galei Tzahal, a radio station run by the Israeli military, Ms. Kadosh said: “We spotted it flying very low, right above our home. We heard the sound it was making and immediately noticed there was something strange about it.” The Israeli military declined to comment.

The sequence of drone attacks has caused alarm in Israel as it prepares for a potential escalation with Iran. After Iran fired a barrage of ballistic missiles at Israel nearly two weeks ago, Israel is widely expected to retaliate, a response that could prompt Iran to fire more missiles and drones.

While Israel has a world-leading system to detect and intercept missiles, which can travel faster than 1,000 miles an hour, its radar systems have found it more challenging to spot unmanned aircraft, which sometimes move slower than 100 miles an hour.

Drones often contain less metal and emit less heat than high-velocity rockets and shells, meaning that they do not always set off alerts. And even when they are spotted, enemy drones are sometimes mistaken for Israeli aircraft, including small private planes, because they fly at similarly low altitudes and speeds.

“All the systems that we have in the Western world — it’s not only Israel — are built to defend or to protect the airspace from regular fighter planes and missiles,” said Ofer Haruvi, a former head of the drone department in the Israeli Air Force. “You need to redesign part of these systems so that they can see and detect and track this kind of slow-moving target.”

Israel’s Iron Dome anti-rocket system destroys the vast majority of rockets fired from Gaza and Lebanon, while its Arrow 3 interceptors were instrumental in largely blocking two massive barrages of ballistic missiles fired by Iran in April and again this month. To enhance those defenses, the United States said on Sunday that it would send Israel another anti-missile system, the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, or THAAD.

But Israel’s anti-drone system in particular requires improvement, experts said.

It relies mainly on radar, which is primarily designed to detect relatively large metallic objects like planes by transmitting a signal and receiving the signal’s reflected echo, according to Onn Fenig, the head of R2 Wireless, a company that designs drone detection systems and works with the Israeli military.

He said there are alternatives, including receptors that passively detect and classify the radio waves emitted by a drone, optical sensors that scan the skies for visual signs of a drone and acoustic sensors that detect the sound of a drone’s engine.

All these systems have advantages and blind spots, and Israel needs to combine them in order to build a more robust drone detection system, Mr. Fenig said.

“There’s no magic solution that, if implemented, would solve all your problems,” he said. “But we need a complete change in mind-set.”

Myra Noveck contributed reporting.

Patrick Kingsley is The Times’s Jerusalem bureau chief, leading coverage of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. More about Patrick Kingsley

Gabby Sobelman is a reporter and researcher, covering Israeli and Palestinian affairs, based in Rehovot, Israel. More about Gabby Sobelman

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 7 of the New York edition with the headline: Hezbollah’s Drone Strike Shows Israeli Vulnerability. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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