How drones could help manage massive Hezbollah rocket attacks
If the worst happens, and Hezbollah rains down its full onslaught of rockets on Israel, including thousands of direct hits, Israel may need to manage the situation using local civilian drones, IDF Maj. (res.) Or Adar, the founder of Local Drone Patrol, said Thursday.
In the nightmare scenarios where the sheer volume of a barrage of 150,000 Hezbollah rockets succeeds in getting thousands of hits on the home front, the IDF, police, and even the municipalities would not have the capacity to keep up with all of the hits and the damage they cause, he said at the UVID Dronetech Conference in Tel Aviv.
In that case, the best way to get a situational assessment would be using local privately owned citizens’ drones to record and perform surveillance of spots hit by rockets, Adar said.
Furthermore, this would simply be broadening a tactic that his new organization has pioneered during the current war with Hamas and Hezbollah, he said.
According to Adar, shortly after the October 7 invasion, he started to see requests for help by civilians in areas that were still potentially in danger.
For example, he said, on October 11, a woman from Lachish said she and most of her community were holed up in their houses indefinitely because they were afraid there might be more Hamas invaders hiding nearby and were hoping someone could provide drones to perform surveillance in the area.
Adar said he started to reach out to multiple circles of contacts, and within three days, 300 owners of drones had offered to “donate” using their drone to assist others with security situations.
It took some more time to organize the initiative and then to fulfil related regulations for operating drones, but before the end of October, the group’s drones were off to the races – or rather off to assist with various crises, he said.
One crisis was when a rocket made a direct hit on a residence in Rishon Lezion. The group used one of its drones to inform rescue workers exactly where the hit took place and provided them with footage of the scene so they understood which parts of the structure they could enter to help and which dangerous parts they needed to avoid.
Currently, the initiative has grown to 1,000 volunteers in 150 local authorities and has led to 3,000 drone flights to provide different forms of assistance.
Sometimes the drones have even succeeded in providing security forces advance warnings of dangers.
Also at the conference Jonathan Barkat, a combat soldier and entrepreneur, spoke about how he had returned to Israel from the US shortly after October 7.
Barkat said although he normally served as a drone operator for the Maglan special unit, this time, he came to work with the paratroopers.
He arrived at the base for Paratrooper Unit 55, however, he found that they had no drones, nor did they have any strategic plans for how to utilize drones.
Barkat said he quickly received approval from IDF Col. Oded Ziman to seek out and integrate the use of drones into the paratroopers’ operations.
Within about six weeks, Barkat said, he had raised $1 million
and purchased 135 commercial drones, which were then customized for the paratroopers’ military use.
One hundred soldiers were trained to use the drones, and the 55th Brigade became the first unit in the IDF Infantry Corps with access to drones all the way down to the platoon level.
On the first day Barkat and his unit entered Gaza, they sent a drone into a structure, where normally they would have just sent troops into it, and the drone found two large gas bombs waiting to be detonated.
Without the drone’s warning, many soldiers would have died in the booby-trapped residence, but instead, they simply destroyed it and avoided the danger, he said.
After that incident, they avoided numerous other similar dangers by always sending a drone into a structure to perform surveillance before having soldiers enter it.
In another case, a drone went into a structure and found four Hamas terrorists, who promptly surrendered to the drone, before the soldiers even came in after it.
Furthermore, the soldiers used the drones extensively to explore tunnels in Khan Yunis before going in, and they avoided many booby-traps.
They also used drones to constantly update their maps, because after IAF and artillery attacks, a neighborhood often looked nothing like it had in the existing maps, Barkat said.
Also at the conference, Police Aviation Division Chief of Staff Oded Shemla said the police in recent years more than doubled the number of drones and drone operators it uses to 334 operators and 445 drones.
Furthermore, the number of drone flight hours skyrocketed from 3,000 to 4,000 hours in 2020 to about 10,000 hours in 2023, he said.
An increasing amount of
drone activity is not merely intended to follow and control large groups of potential public disorder, but rather, it is being used to gather intelligence on terrorists and to prove that criminals have perpetrated illegal transactions, he said.
One video showed criminals throwing a bag of weapons off the backside of a building to avoid police detection. Since the drone recorded the incident, however, the police were able to locate the hiding place of the weapons, Shemla said.
Other discussions at the conference addressed how drones will soon revolutionize the commercial aviation industry, replacing more and more human-piloted aircraft as well as massive amounts of data being gathered by “edge” technological platforms out in the field, which use similar surveillance technologies as drones but are not always entirely wired into a headquarters-based cloud.