Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday that Israel has formed a dedicated team with an unlimited budget to neutralize the fiber-optic FPV drone threat that Hezbollah has escalated sharply since March 2026. The prime minister told his cabinet that the Israel Defense Forces and the Defense Ministry had already thwarted “many hundreds, if not thousands” of attempted drone and UAV strikes in recent years, but acknowledged that the new generation of first-person-view systems posed a qualitatively different challenge.
The urgency of the announcement was underscored by a mounting casualty toll in southern Lebanon. Since early March, at least four IDF soldiers and one civilian contractor have been killed by FPV drone strikes, with dozens more wounded, according to Israeli media tallies and BBC monitoring. Hezbollah has published dozens of verified videos showing small explosive drones striking Israeli tanks, armored vehicles, and troop positions, often in rapid sequence.
The fiber-optic drones at the center of the crisis are difficult to counter with standard electronic warfare. Because the operator guides the drone through a thin cable unreeled over tens of kilometers, the aircraft emits no radio signal to jam and leaves a minimal radar footprint. Experts told the BBC that these features render Israel’s existing detection and interception systems “largely irrelevant.” The drones are also remarkably cheap, costing an estimated $300 to $500 per unit, while they can disable vehicles worth millions of dollars.
Netanyahu said he had convened a special team drawn from the Defense Ministry, the defense industry, and the civilian technology sector, holding three meetings in the past two weeks. The team’s mandate, he said, carries no financial ceiling. “Whatever it costs, it costs. You also have no limits, as far as I know, to your creativity and imagination,” he told them, according to a TASS report from Tel Aviv.
On the operational side, the IDF is pursuing several stopgap and long-term measures. The Ground Forces’ Technological Brigade has supplied troops in Lebanon with approximately 158,000 square meters of wire mesh nets, used to shield vehicles from final-stage impacts, with another 188,000 square meters on order — an area roughly equivalent to 20 soccer fields. The IDF has also begun trial deployment of the Iron Drone Raider, a net-based autonomous interceptor system, though sources told Haaretz and Ynet that its performance has so far been limited and that existing systems “do not provide a comprehensive solution.”
Longer-term efforts include a dedicated IDF factory to produce FPV “suicide” drones domestically. Army Radio reported that the facility will employ some 200 ultra-Orthodox soldiers and aims to supply thousands of drones within two months, scaling to tens of thousands per month. In parallel, the Defense Ministry placed an order for 5,000 FPV drones from Israeli firm XTEND last year, some of which have already been used in combat against Hezbollah operatives.
Netanyahu linked the counter-drone push to a broader $118 billion defense investment plan over the next decade, covering advanced aircraft and domestic munitions production. He also noted that Israel had studied drone tactics from the Ukraine war and installed protective canopies on tanks as an early countermeasure.
The Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center has documented a significant expansion in Hezbollah’s FPV drone operations, describing fiber-optic FPV systems as “a central component of Hezbollah’s battlefield doctrine” since March 2026. The group has launched roughly 80 explosive drones at Israeli troops over a two-and-a-half-week period alone, according to JNS.
“It will take time,” Netanyahu said in a video statement, “but we are on it.”