(Corrects day to Wednesday in paragraph 4)
By Maya Gebeily, Maayan Lubell and Catherine Cartier
BEIRUT/JERUSALEM, May 12 (Reuters) - While Washington and Tehran argue over a deal to end the attacks on shipping that are shaking the world economy, Iran's most powerful ally Hezbollah and Israel are stepping up a drone war in Lebanon - on camera - that is complicating the path to peace.
In recent weeks, Hezbollah has used cheap, easy-to-assemble First Person View kamikaze drones to transform the war it has been fighting since it began firing on Israel on March 2, days after the U.S.-Israeli forces began their attacks on Iran.
Controlled with fiber-optic cables, the FPV drones can evade Israel's high-tech jamming technologies to target its troops occupying southern Lebanon during a shaky ceasefire announced on April 16, a week after the truce in the wider Iran war began.
The Iran-backed group has published videos of more than 45 FPV attacks, 28 of them in the nearly four weeks since the ceasefire, which had halted Israeli attacks on the Lebanese capital before Israel said it targeted a Hezbollah commander there on Wednesday.
The truce has also left Israeli ground forces occupying a so-called buffer zone up to 10 km (six miles) in from the border, in confined territory, which Hezbollah knows well, and vulnerable to such attacks.
All of the videos before the ceasefire was announced showed UAVs flying at static positions or vehicles including tanks and excavators, with no fatalities reported by Israel. But since the ceasefire was announced, Hezbollah began targeting groups of soldiers, reporting five attacks. Three Israeli soldiers and one contractor were reported by Israel to have been killed.
Israel is firing back, with at least two deadly FPV drone attacks against Hezbollah in April complete with published drone images purporting to show Hezbollah fighters up close.
The widespread use of FPV attack drones began several years ago and thousands of kilometres away in Ukraine, where front lines are covered with netting to defend against Russia’s drones, and where some drone operators are watching Hezbollah.
"They are amateurs, but they are learning," said Dmytro Putiata, a drone warfare expert serving in Ukraine's Unmanned Systems Brigades.
WHY DOES THE DRONE WAR IN LEBANON MATTER?
Iran and mediator Pakistan say any U.S.-Iranian peace agreement must include a halt to Israeli strikes in Lebanon to prevent an escalation there restarting the wider Iran war.
U.S.-mediated direct talks between the Lebanese government and Israel are due to resume on Thursday and Friday, but progress has been slow; Israel insists that Lebanon disarm Hezbollah, which risks reigniting conflict in a country that suffered a 1975-1990 civil war.
Hezbollah's head of media relations, Youssef el-Zein, said the group assessed that continued Israeli troop casualties from FPV drones could force an Israeli withdrawal more effectively than the negotiations with Israel, which Hezbollah opposes.
Israeli troops who have invaded southern Lebanon in the current conflict presented "an opportunity, and not a threat," as they could be more easily targeted, he said.
"We know the enemy's supremacy, but we also know their points of weakness. We are taking advantage of the points of weakness to create that balance," Zein told reporters.
According to a Hezbollah commander, a specialized drone unit works with the organization’s procurement team to purchase parts from various markets.
They are checked for signs of Israeli interference, according to a Lebanese military source briefed on Hezbollah’s drone usage. The group has been on high alert since thousands of its communication devices were booby-trapped and detonated by Israel in 2024.
Hezbollah’s first FPV video shows an attack dated March 22, three weeks into the war. The first footage showing its drone components, including the warhead, is dated April 11.
"The drones shown in the imagery all show systems assembled from parts commonly made by Chinese enterprises and sold freely on the online marketplaces," said Konrad Iturbe, a drone expert based in Spain with experience flying and modifying commercial quadcopters.
HOW DO THE DRONES WORK?
A basic drone costs less than $400, according to the Hezbollah commander and an Israeli drone expert. Reuters geolocated the attacks to towns running the entire strip of Lebanon’s border area, showing the breadth of their deployment.
A Russian PG-7L highly explosive anti-tank warhead was fitted on the drone in the April 11 footage, according to a drone operator in Ukraine who declined to be named for security reasons and a foreign security official tracking Hezbollah’s drones.
Hezbollah’s arsenal already included those warheads, the foreign official said, but fitting them onto a drone made them a longer-range, precision weapon.
Asked whether Hezbollah was relying on Russian drone expertise, Zein said the group had in-house experts.
Founded in 1982 with help from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, Hezbollah, which has tens of thousands of rockets and precision missiles, began developing drone capabilities in 2004 and used them in 2006 and 2024 wars.
The drone operator in Ukraine said the Hezbollah pilots appeared to have had a few weeks of training. He said the spool in the April 11 footage was consistent with a canister holding about 10 km (six miles) of fiber-optic wiring to link drone and pilot - a link that the Hezbollah commander said was key.
"The objective is that Israeli radar systems cannot detect them, effectively blinding the enemy," he said.
WHAT IS ISRAEL DOING ABOUT THEM?
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has acknowledged the drones are a problem. "A few weeks ago, I ordered the establishment of a special project to thwart the drone threat... It will take time, but we are on it," he said on May 3.
The Israeli military has reported near-daily explosive drones launched at its forces in southern Lebanon. Israel’s Army Radio says they have hurt as many as 40 troops.
An Israeli defence official said that the drones were harder to detect and neutralize because they are small, and are flown "low and slow" by Hezbollah crews who know the topography well.
ALMA, an Israeli think tank, said Hezbollah’s attacks during the ceasefire predominantly used drones and the dissemination of footage created “significant psychological impact.”
Israeli critics say solutions should have already been found. The defence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters, said there was no quick fix.
Israel’s defence establishment has been looking at Ukraine and studying the drone threat for over a year, he said. New defence measures could be deployed within weeks to months.
While high-tech solutions are being developed, low-tech solutions, like nets, will be deployed and enhancements to soldiers' rifles were expected to help take down the drones too, the defence official said.
The Israeli military has also been using its Iron Dome missile interceptor system and has boosted radar detection, a senior Israeli military official said. A newly developed drone interception system was tested by the Air Force in April, the official said, but it failed.
Both the officials said that the best defence is striking the Hezbollah crews operating the drones. Israel published a video on April 13 of a target covering his face as a drone approaches and another on April 29 targeting a fighter on a motorbike. Israel has not published images of its own drones.
Iturbe said some Hezbollah pilots seemed to have moved from easier but less effective fixed-angle flying to pitching down, speeding up and hitting vehicles from above.
"Lesson clearly learned here," he said.
Still, Hezbollah’s videos show drones mostly targeting armoured vehicles, not soldiers, with few consecutive attacks on a target, or shots from a second drone or surveillance position.
"Individual clips of vehicles being struck are great for political videos, but do not necessarily translate into military effect," forensic imagery analyst William Goodhind said.
(Additional reporting by Laila Bassam; editing by Philippa Fletcher)
