On the eve of Rosh Hashanah on October 2, 2024, Cpt. Eitan Itzhak Oster, 22, was killed in a Hezbollah ambush in a village in southern Lebanon just a few hundred yards from the Israeli border on the northern front.

Eitan was remembered as the first casualty of Israel’s ground operation in Lebanon against the Iran-backed terror group. For his older brother Udi Oster, a serial tech entrepreneur, the family tragedy exposed a deadly gap. Israel’s superior tech and firepower were unable to meet the actual demands of the modern battlefield, where conditions are constantly shifting and seldom ideal.

“Even though Israel is known to have one of the world’s best defenses, they found themselves at a disadvantage,” said Oster. “Because it was highly overcast and the difficult terrain and topography, they couldn’t get any air backup, and evacuation was impossible for hours, so they were basically alone with what they had in their arsenal.”

At the time of his brother’s death, Oster was already working to address one facet of that difficulty via his startup EyesAtop, which has developed a plug-and-play platform to easily integrate and operate multiple drones simultaneously, giving soldiers a larger range of tactical options in complex battlefield scenarios.

Today, the main challenge facing troops in southern Lebanon are Hezbollah’s first-person view (FPW) fiber-optic drones, which the Iran-backed terror group has used in attacks on Israeli troops in southern Lebanon and northern Israel to deadly effect.

In Lebanon and elsewhere, as terror groups have made effective use of off-the-shelf drones, state militaries have countered with robotic systems, including surveillance, interceptor, and heavy-lift drones.

With these weapons marking warfare’s bleeding edge, an arms race is taking place between drone technology and innovations meant to combat them. But Israel has struggled to keep up, according to Oster, relying on systems not built to adopt and integrate fast-evolving technology for battlefield use.

Oster, who took over the defense tech startup together with fellow IDF intelligence unit 8200 veteran Daniel Almog weeks into the October 7, 2023 onslaught, emphasized that drones and autonomous tools can do what human soldiers can’t, in places soldiers can’t safely go, while artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming how those drones operate.

Prior to October 7, EyesAtop was run by founders Idan Itzhak, Einav Harazi and Ben Barkay, who were........

© The Times of Israel