The Technology to Neutralize Hezbollah’s Drones Already Exists
Israel ordered the evacuation of two hundred thousand residents from the southern Lebanese city of Tyre on Wednesday and began striking Hezbollah command centers across the area. The decision followed weeks of escalating drone attacks. According to figures shared by an Israeli official with PBS News, Hezbollah has fired over one thousand drones and more than seven hundred rockets since the April 17 ceasefire.
Most of those drones are small, cheap, and guided by fiber-optic cables thinner than dental floss. They emit no radio signal. Israel’s electronic warfare cannot jam them. They appear less than five seconds before they hit. In recent weeks, at least four soldiers and a civilian contractor have been killed by these drones in southern Lebanon, with dozens of soldiers wounded. In early May, Hezbollah released footage of a fiber-optic drone striking an Iron Dome launcher and its maintenance crew at the Jal al-Alam military site in northern Israel. The Israel Defense Forces confirmed the strike.
The IDF has acknowledged that it lacks a reliable counter to the threat and has rushed thousands of meters of fishing nets to troops in the north. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has told the country that “the best minds” are working on the problem with “no budget constraint.”
There is a solution. It has existed since 2018.
The hunter that already flies
A company in Utah called Fortem Technologies builds an autonomous drone-on-drone interceptor called the DroneHunter F700. When a hostile drone is detected, the interceptor launches itself, locks onto the target with its onboard radar, closes in, and fires a net. The hostile drone is entangled and brought down. The DroneHunter returns to base, reusable. It carries no warhead. It launches in seconds and is reloaded in under three minutes. Fortem reports more than four thousand five hundred drone captures in the field. NBC News showed the system on national television in 2018.
Combat-proven in Ukraine
This is not a marketing demo. At least six F700 units, nicknamed “Shahed Hunters,” have been deployed in Ukraine since 2023. Their success rate against Group 1, 2, and 3 drones, the technical classification that covers everything from small commercial quadcopters to Iranian Shahed loitering munitions, is between ninety and one hundred percent. Most missions complete in two to three minutes. The system is proven against the Russian Orlan-10. It is proven against the Shahed-136, the same Iranian platform whose smaller variants Hezbollah operates today.
The class of drones killing Israeli soldiers and hitting Iron Dome batteries is the same class the DroneHunter has been intercepting in a real war for two years.
The Pentagon already bought
In January, the U.S. counter-UAS task force selected the DroneHunter as the first operational purchase under the Department of Defense’s Replicator-2 initiative. Fortem holds an eighteen-million-dollar contract with the U.S. Army and is integrating its hardware with Lockheed Martin’s Sanctum air-defense system. In February, five DroneHunter interceptors operating under a single AI command intercepted five incoming drones in what is believed to be the first fully autonomous five-versus-five engagement. The system will help protect the 2026 FIFA World Cup.
The radar everyone imagines as huge
A common assumption about Fortem’s radar is that it is a large fixed installation. It is not. The TrueView R20 and R30 weigh less than seven kilograms each. They can be carried by hand. The airborne variant, the R20i, flies on the DroneHunter itself. The interceptor carries its own radar.
The radar is also not blind to Hezbollah’s drones. It is active. It does not depend on the target emitting a signal. It was built specifically to detect small, low-flying, slow-moving drones that other radars struggle to follow, and Fortem claims to be the only physical drone mitigation system with real World Cup experience defeating “dark drones,” the term for drones that emit nothing.
Israel is already building its own
Israel has not been idle. Israel Aerospace Industries and other defense firms have presented the Defense Ministry with a range of solutions, including kinetic interception systems and energy-based systems, one of them using electromagnetic force to capture drones in flight. These are being tested as prototypes at the Directorate of Defense Research and Development.
This is the right instinct. Israel almost always builds its own answer to threats on its frontier, for reasons of sovereignty, adaptation, and the strength of its defense industry. A sovereign solution, when it arrives, will be better tuned to Israeli terrain than anything bought abroad.
The honest problem is the word “when.” Developing, testing, and fielding a new interceptor at scale takes years. The drones are hitting now.
What the DroneHunter could defend today
While Israel finishes its prototypes, a combat-proven system already exists that could be trialed in the meantime. The DroneHunter would not solve every part of the problem, and protecting infantry maneuvering through broken terrain remains the hardest case for any system. But the catalogue of what it could plausibly defend today is not small.
It could defend fixed positions of soldiers in southern Lebanon. It could defend the northern Israeli towns that Hezbollah strikes nightly. It could defend the forward-deployed Iron Dome batteries that are now themselves targets. It could defend tanks and armored columns at staging areas, airfields, fuel depots, and command posts. Each of these is an asset class the DroneHunter was designed and combat-proven to protect.
This is not a betrayal of sovereignty. It is a stopgap to save lives while the sovereign solution is built.
The argument against waiting
There is no military doctrine in any tradition that says, when the enemy is hitting your air defense and killing your soldiers daily with a weapon you cannot stop, refuse the tested tool already on the shelf because you are building your own.
Israel will build the answer this moment deserves. When it does, it will be better suited to its valleys than anything ordered from Utah. But until then, the question keeps asking itself. Should a system already cleared by the Pentagon and combat-proven in Ukraine not at least be brought in to defend what it was designed to defend?
The drones are not slowing down. Iron Dome batteries are no longer invincible. The clock is the only variable Israel does not control.
Disclosure: The author has no commercial interest, affiliation, or business relationship with Fortem Technologies or with any of the other companies or organizations mentioned in this article. No compensation of any kind was received in connection with its publication.
