Israel ordered the evacuation of two hundred thousand residents from the southern Lebanese city of Tyre on Wednesday and began striking Hezbollah command centers across the area. The decision followed weeks of escalating drone attacks. According to figures shared by an Israeli official with PBS News, Hezbollah has fired over one thousand drones and more than seven hundred rockets since the April 17 ceasefire.

Most of those drones are small, cheap, and guided by fiber-optic cables thinner than dental floss. They emit no radio signal. Israel’s electronic warfare cannot jam them. They appear less than five seconds before they hit. In recent weeks, at least four soldiers and a civilian contractor have been killed by these drones in southern Lebanon, with dozens of soldiers wounded. In early May, Hezbollah released footage of a fiber-optic drone striking an Iron Dome launcher and its maintenance crew at the Jal al-Alam military site in northern Israel. The Israel Defense Forces confirmed the strike.

The IDF has acknowledged that it lacks a reliable counter to the threat and has rushed thousands of meters of fishing nets to troops in the north. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has told the country that “the best minds” are working on the problem with “no budget constraint.”

There is a solution. It has existed since 2018.

The hunter that already flies

A company in Utah called Fortem Technologies builds an autonomous drone-on-drone interceptor called the DroneHunter F700. When a hostile drone is detected, the interceptor launches itself, locks onto the target with its onboard radar, closes in, and fires a net. The hostile drone is entangled and brought down. The DroneHunter........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)