Israel has one of the most advanced air defense systems in the world, and is also a leader in artificial intelligence and other technologies.
Despite this, Hezbollah has been able to seemingly pierce some of Israel’s defenses through the use of small drones. This new threat is emerging in the buffer zone that Israel carved out in Lebanon.
On Tuesday, an Israeli father and son who worked as Defense Ministry civilian contractors were targeted by a drone in Lebanon. Amer Hujirat, 44, from Shafa-Amr, near Haifa, was killed. His son witnessed the attack and described it to Israeli media.
Ynet quoted the son as saying, “I got on the engineering vehicle and suddenly saw a small, fast drone behind the excavator. It was flying low and focused its camera on us. I panicked and immediately jumped off the vehicle. It came to attack me. I ran, and my father ran, but the drone chased him, and the explosive charge hit him and detonated.”
These types of drone attacks have become common in the Ukraine war. In many cases, a drone with a first-person-view is flown into an individual or personnel. While these drones don’t win a conflict, they can cause casualties every day. For Israel in Lebanon, this is a deadly threat.
Israel has faced similar deadly threats when it occupied southern Lebanon from 1982 to 2000. That costly conflict led to many deaths of soldiers who were sent to do the thankless task of patrolling the security zone and manning outposts. In those days, Hezbollah used different weapons, but it was the same Hezbollah.
The US-backed ceasefire in Lebanon appears to have shifted the fighting
Security zones have become a kind of new Israeli doctrine. The concept is different than the zone in the 1980s. Today, Israel razes all the buildings in an area and orders the civilian population to leave.
This was done in Gaza, forcing around a million people to leave half of Gaza, and the areas near the Israeli border were systematically destroyed.
The theory is that once everything is flattened, it’s harder for people to return, and harder for terrorist groups that work among those people to return.
The argument is that the October 7 massacre occurred because Hamas could get close to the border. Push back all the people a few miles, and it’s unlikely to happen again.
This policy has been extended to Lebanon, in an open and public way, and Hezbollah understands what is happening.
However, Hezbollah can view this as an opportunity.
Hezbollah knows now that anyone in the security zone is an Israeli target. All it has to do is wait for opportunities. It can also use the displaced Shi’ites who had to flee the border area as a pool of recruits. The Lebanese army showed in 2025 that it was unable to remove Hezbollah from southern Lebanon. UNIFIL – the UN force in Lebanon – also won’t remove them.
The US-backed ceasefire in Lebanon has appeared to change the fighting so that the security or buffer zone has now become the “fighting area.” This kind of normalized low-level fighting is not unknown in ceasefire zones.
In Ukraine, between 2015 and 2022, there was also a ceasefire. During that period, there would be clashes along hundreds of miles of the ceasefire line. The clashes involved small arms. I witnessed this in 2017 when I went to Marinka in Ukraine on the Donbas front.
Even though the Ukrainian military would record the “ceasefire violations,” both sides basically accepted that every day there would be some rifle fire as long as larger attacks were not carried out; everyone basically accepted this as the norm. Civilians travelling near the ceasefire zone knew they could be targeted. But if they moved a few miles away, then there was less chance of being killed.
Now, it seems, there is a new zone like this in Lebanon. Israel has been here before. After the 2000 withdrawal, Hezbollah came down to the border and also clashed with the IDF. These were called “battle days,” but as long as they were low-level incidents, it was seen as a kind of norm. This was during the Second Intifada, and Israel was focused on major battles in the West Bank and Gaza during Operation Defensive Shield.
After Gilad Schalit was kidnapped in 2006 by Palestinian militias, Hezbollah believed it could also attack Israel and kidnap soldiers.
Hezbollah carried out an attack, and this led to the month-long 2006 war. That war basically ended the phenomenon of low-level clashes. Between 2006 and 2023, there were only a few incidents.
In one incident, Hezbollah was basically allowed to target a decoy on the border, as part of a policy of essentially appeasing Hezbollah so that a large war wouldn’t happen. The same happened with the maritime deal in 2022 and the Hezbollah “tents” on Mount Dov.
Now the buffer zone has redrawn the maritime boundary; there are no more Hezbollah tents.
However, Hezbollah is always willing to innovate. Its use of new drones is how it intends to confront the IDF in the new era. The question is whether this will become an accepted norm, with new IDF innovations to confront the drones, or whether this will stop.