Hezbollah learns lessons from Ukraine in scorched earth drone war

The sun-baked battlefields across the Middle East are a far cry from the fertile plains of Ukraine’s front line, but the tactics deployed by the fighters there are beginning to align.

Hezbollah has used small, first-person view [FPV] drones to strike Israeli forces for the first time since the Iran war and Israel’s offensive against the militia in southern Lebanon began.

Video published by the Iranian proxy group last week shows a drone hitting an IDF Merkava main battle tank in Houla, southern Lebanon.

On Tuesday, Hezbollah released further footage showing fresh FPV strikes on Israeli armoured units in al‑Bayada, south Lebanon. A “swarm” of attack drones appears to have hit two parked Israeli Namer armoured personnel carriers and a Humvee.

Defence analysts suggest the militia may try to halt Israeli advances by establishing a Ukrainian-style “kill zone” — the 1,300km-long and 30km-wide front line in eastern Ukraine where drones have brought the Russian invasion to a standstill.

As the war with Iran spread across the Gulf, Israeli forces have used airstrikes and sent armoured infantry units into southern Lebanon to “thwart” any potential Hezbollah incursions.

Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, said on Sunday that his troops had created “three security zones deep in enemy territory” — in Gaza, Syria and Lebanon.

He added that an order had been given to “further expand the existing security zone” in Lebanon to “definitively” prevent an invasion, and to push anti-tank missile fire away from our border”.

Netanyahu’s defence minister, Israel Katz, said on Tuesday that the IDF would destroy buildings in the buffer zone, which has been reported to be stretching five miles into Lebanon from the Israeli border.

The area would not be occupied but remain under Israeli control after the end of the offensive, he said.

“At the end of the operation, the IDF will establish itself in a security zone inside Lebanon, on a defensive line against anti-tank missiles, and will maintain security control over the entire area up to the Litani,” Katz said.

“All houses in villages near the Lebanese border will be destroyed, in accordance with the model used in Rafah and Beit Hanoun in Gaza, in order to permanently remove the threats near the border to northern [Israeli] residents,” he added.

More than 1,200 people have been killed in Lebanon since Israel launched its latest offensive on March 2. Among them were two Indonesian peacekeepers who died in a roadside explosion striking their convoy on Monday, the United Nations peacekeeping chief, Jean-Pierre Lacroix, told the UN Security Council.

An Israeli strike on Tuesday hit a building adjacent to Beirut’s main airport road which the IDF claimed was a “Hezbollah facility”.

Hezbollah has launched 5,000 missiles, rockets, and drones from Lebanon targeting Israel since March 2, according to Gideon Saar, the Israeli foreign minister.

The group primarily uses anti-tank missiles to target IDF armoured infantry units, but military analysts predict a greater use of cheap FPV kamikaze drones as their traditional stockpiles deplete.

Unverified photographs circulating online claim to show the remains of a Hezbollah quadcopter that failed to detonate. It was armed with an RPG warhead and controlled using a fibre-optic cable. These more sophisticated FPV drones are more worrying for Israeli forces, as they cannot be downed by radio or GPS jamming.

Francis Tusa, a defence analyst, described Hezbollah as one of the most “adaptive” militias in the region and said he was not surprised to see them learn lessons from the war in Ukraine.

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If deployed at scale, their drones could effectively create a new kill zone in the region, similar to the one in Ukraine, he warned.

“If you have got that capability and you look at the experience of Ukraine — a smaller force with far less equipment — you will use everything you can to rectify balance,” he said.

“One of the advantages about FPV drones is potentially its five or six kilometre range. An RPG is 400 metres. It’s not a direct fire weapon, so you could be on the other side of a hill, and leave the Israelis thinking: where the hell did that come from?”

Justin Crump, a British tank commander turned security analyst, said: “Hezbollah has a good amount of anti-tank missiles that they still seem to be using. As with Ukraine, they would likely use these first and more often in preference, especially at the start of the conflict.

“FPV usage will increase as stocks run low of missiles and availability dynamic shifts, if it follows the trajectory of other conflicts. They will have been getting Russian lessons second hand [at least].”

Israeli tanks use Trophy, a countermeasure system which protects them from anti-tank missiles and some shells. The system is also supposed to work against drones, but appears to have failed to stop Hezbollah’s FPV attack.

Hamas, another Iranian-proxy, also deployed FPV drones of various types during its October 7 attack against Israel, and subsequently against IDF forces in Gaza, though their use has not been widespread.

This month, the Iranian-backed paramilitary group Kataib Hezbollah, which is separate from the Lebanese Hezbollah, targeted the American Camp Victory base in Baghdad, central Iraq, with FPV drones for the first time. The initial strikes were reported to have resulted in minimal damage, but exposed the vulnerability of major military installations in the region. Further drone attacks appeared to hit a parked US Black Hawk helicopter.

To counter the emerging drone threat, and prevent the formation of a static kill zone, Tusa suggested that Israel may choose to “blitzkrieg” southern Lebanon.

“They might just move at top speed and say ‘we’re just going to overrun every single drone position we can’,” he said. “Either Hezbollah positions are just overrun and mopped up by the second wave, or they retreat.”

The adoption of drones across the region has also raised concerns about Russia’s growing footprint in the conflict.

Alexander Lutsenko, an Israeli-Ukrainian analyst for the Times of Israel, warned that if attack drones are “appearing more clearly in Hezbollah’s arsenal, then Israel is confronting something larger than a single incident”.

He said: “It may be facing the transfer of an entire combat model — one refined on the battlefields of Ukraine and now filtering into the northern arena through Iranian channels.

“An FPV drone, a direct hunt for armour, a cheap and targeted strike against a vulnerable military asset — this is exactly the kind of drone warfare Russia has been using against Ukraine for a long time.”

Lutsenko added that the idea that the “Russian FPV warfare school may now be spilling into the Middle East” via Iran and its proxies “no longer sounds far-fetched”.

“It is not a fully proven public fact,” he said, “but it is a serious signal, especially for Israel, which is already dealing not only with rockets, but with an increasingly technological Iranian threat network.”

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