Muhammad Amin
Genocidal Israel is scrambling to realign and redesign its air defences to counter the growing threat of drones from Lebanon after a strike on a military base in Haifa killed four soldiers.
The successful attack took Israeli soldier deaths from drone attacks since the start of the assault on Lebanon to 10, and has Tel Aviv’s mad scientists tearing out their hair in frustration that the low-tech, low-cost drones are stumping their famous, and very expensive, hi-tech air defences.
“We already have six dead in the past 10 days from drones. That’s too much,” said Ran Kochav, a former head of the Zionists’ air defence command. He says drones “have become a real threat.”
Israeli genocide minister Yoav Gallant – who has turned to directly targeting civilians in northern Gaza because his efforts to hit Hamas have come to naught after 343 days of unrestrained rage – is under pressure to find ways to counter the drone menace.
He says Israel is “concentrating significant efforts in developing solutions”. So far, the only measure open to the genocidal state is widening the net of detection stations dotting the landscape. Experts warn that is likely to increase the number of false alarms across the country, which is likely to disrupt its economy even further.
Exacerbating the false-alarm problem was a feature of the Haifa drone’s performance – it “disappeared” from the defence radar screens, causing operators to presume it had crashed, only to reappear moments before it hit its target.
So the radar defences will have to continue trying to track potential flight paths from every drone that blips off their screens until they receive eye-witness confirmation it has been neutralised. Drones are primarily countered with electronic warfare radio signals that cause them to lose course and crash harmlessly. Not being able to strike “disappeared” drones from the threat list will add to the strain on the entire system.
And it is the system itself that has been the prime target of most drone attacks. Tal Beeri, a research director from the Alma Centre says Hezbollah’s drones have been slamming “into the very batteries and infrastructure meant to take them down”.
That’s because the system was designed to combat large precision missiles and super-fast ballistic rockets with jet propulsion; not tiny, propeller-driven, slow-moving, aircraft primarily made of plastic.
Drone design makes them more difficult to detect and intercept. Now, it seems they also have an ability to mask themselves somehow, making them “invisible” on their final flight path.
Israeli media said the Haifa drone hit a military base just as its killers were sitting down to dinner, exploding in their midst and killing four. Israeli media speculated the timing and location of the attack were deliberately chosen to maximise casualties.
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