Shocking Drone Footage of Northern Israel Released by Hezbollah
Represents unprecedented failure by Israeli Air Defence
This event represents an unprecedentedfailure of Israel’s Air Defences!
I’d know as I spent my entire military service in the IDF’s Air Defence Command which is part of the Air Force.
First part of the footage
On June 18 this year, the Lebanon-based Shi’a militia Hezbollah released 9.5 minutes of drone footage from and around the city of Haifa, Israel’s third largest city and home of the country’s main port as well as the HQ of the Israeli Navy.
Haifa also happens to be where I grew up and spent close to two decades in, including part of my military service, so you can say I know the area quite well…
Therefore, I can confidently say that footage looks completely authentic.
For context:
Haifa is Israel’s third largest city and the country’s primary port city.
Haifa is located 27 kilometres (17 miles)from the Lebanese border.
Other than Israel’s primary (and largest) port, Haifa is also home to the headquarters of the Israeli navy as well as several other highly sensitive military installations.
The primary facility of Rafael Advanced Defence Systems, one of the major components of Israel’s military industrial complex, is also located there. As you can imagine, most of the work done at Rafael is highly sensitive with a significant part being completely classified to a level that the staff who work on it can’t even tell their own families what they are working on. Rafael developed the Arrow missile-to-missile system and the Iron Dome interception system, amongst others.
Haifa is home to Israel’s primary oil refinery and the centre of the country’s petrochemical industry (hence the heavy air pollution which has plagued parts of it for decades). A direct hit to any of these facilities will be akin to a nuclear strike on the city. These are the estimates of the IDF home front command, not mine. This was actually attempted by Saddam Hussein back in 1991 during the first gulf war and while the soviet-made Scud missiles Iraq had back then can’t even be considered primitive compared to the rockets Hezbollah has now, one such missile did manage to hit a shopping centre in the area that was still under construction at the time (hence no casualties).
The Hezbollah footage clearly shows the port, the navy HQ, Rafael and various petrochemical facilities including processing and storage. It is also in full HD quality showing great detail.
The full footage from the Haifa area, as released by Hezbollah, can be seen in the first part of the video above as well as below:
Here are some still shots from the Hezbollah footage above that are worth highlighting:
This coverage by Al Jazeera provides some additional context but obviously keep in mind their affiliation as Al Jazeera is owned by the government of Qatar.
At the time this footage was released Hezbollah claimed that this just a small sample of what they have and they have hours of footage in total.
They also said that the mission was carried out using an Iranian-made Hudhud 3 (a.k.a hoopoe) reconnaissance drone.
Hudhud 3 is electrically powered with no thermal or acoustic signature and is capable of carrying a variety of cameras, with a maximum speed of 70 kph (43 mph) and a stated maximum flight time of one hour.
The Israeli Airforce responded to the release of the footage by saying that the footage is recent (likely the week prior) and also that:
Hezbollah launched three drones in total. One was intercepted, another disappeared from radar and is believed to have crashed into the sea and the third completed its reconnaissance mission.
The aircraft was a small, unarmed device equipped with a GoPro camera.
The drone was not shot down to avoid panic and injury to civilians but would have been downed if it had been an attack drone.
I call complete and utter BS on that and here is why:
If the air defence command tracked any or all these drones, it would have been aware of WHERE at least one of them flew over and WHAT extremely sensitive footage it has likely obtained.
In such an instance, the TOP priority would have been to do whatever is necessary to ensure the drone does NOT complete its mission.
Panic amongst the general public would definitely 100% NOT have been a consideration in such serious circumstances. I can say that with absolute certainty!
With regards to “injury to civilians”, while that is a valid concern, two things don’t add up:
The nature of the footage taken by the drone is HIGHLY sensitive. Other than the Navy HQ (with naval vessels docked), I can also see parts of the Airforce base I spend part of my military service in, as well as the Rafael facility where the drone obtained footage of Iron Dome batteries, rocket engine depots as well as David's Sling air defence facilities and radar; and
Most importantly: while Haifa is a major and relatively densely populated city, the drone needed to travel almost 30 Km in Israeli Airspace before crossing back into Lebanon. I can tell you with absolute certainty that there are plenty of spots between Haifa and the Lebanese border that are sparsely populated (or not populated at all) where Air Defence could have easily shot that drone down in a safe manner, especially if they were tracking it closely as the Airforce alleges.
I don’t care what the IDF says!
This is SHOCKING level of failure and incompetence, not to mention a big humiliation and demoralisation for all Israelis to see that.
But wait….there’s more!!
Second part of the footage
If that wasn’t enough of a debacle already, a few days ago on July 9, Hezbollah released a SECOND VIDEO with footage taken all overnorthern Israel!
The footage is almost 10 minutes long and is included as the second part of the video above as well as in full below.
You’ll notice that it starts with ‘extracts’ from the June 18 footage over Haifa as if to provide a recap of the ‘previous episode’.
It also shows the Hezbollah drone operators at their console as well as the drone itself:
The video starts with a map showing the Golan Heights (which has had a strategic installation of military intelligence called “Mount Dov” there since 1967 which was also captured by the Syrian army at the start of the 1973 Yom Kippur war) and various major cities in northern Israel including Nahariya, Safed and Afula, in addition to Haifa which was ‘featured’ heavily in the previous video.
It’s assumed that these are shown because Hezbollah managed to conduct drone missions over all these locations.
This video shows, amongst other things, what Hezbollah claims are:
Various Listening/Signal Intelligence (SigInt) installations of the IDF’s military intelligence command, which Hezbollah referred to in the video as “the eyes of Israel”;
Electronic Warfare installations of “strategic importance”;
“Iron Dome” batteries;
An unnamed “new medical centre”;
Various military outposts as well as major bases (with the command centres within them clearly marked); and
Gathering/staging areas used by the IDF to move troops and equipment, including buses spotted there:
Unlike the previous video, this one according to Hezbollah, contains only footage of “military targets” as opposed to also sights with “economic significance” which were included in the footage from Haifa (e.g. the port and oil refinery/terminal).
The IDF responded by saying that they were not aware of these drone incursions previously.
They also said that their analysis shows this is footage likely obtained across multiple missions with the footage from the staging areas appearing to be more recent while footage from the Golan Heights probably being at least 4-5 months old as some snow can still be seen on mountain tops.
The Golan Heights is the only place in Israel which gets snow on regular basis every winter and contains Israel’s only ski resort at Mount Hermon.
According to Israeli legacy media outlet i24News, an unnamed source they describe as “an expert in air defence and former high ranking military officer” told them that:
“Based on the quality of the footage, this appears to be a simple glider. Modern gliders have very good resolutions and can reach such heights.
I estimate that a Hezbollah drone such as this would have been identified and shot down within less than 9 minutes.
While there are systems for detecting gliders, the size of the gliders and the low altitude they fly in make detecting them challenging.”
He further added that he doesn’t think those drones were launched from outside Israel and instead were launched by people inside Israel which makes obtaining such footage “easy to do”.
Make of this what you will.
The recent escalation between Israel and Hezbollah
Israel and Hezbollah exchanged blows for well over two decades with the last major conflict between the two being the Second Lebanon War in 2006.
After the events of October 7, which I wrote about extensively here, things on Israel’s northern border have heated up, especially after the IDF’s ground invasion to Gaza began, despite Hezbollah warning Israel against doing so.
Hezbollah has been conducting regular strikes via missiles and drones of military targets and civilian towns along the northern border.
One major town hit especially hard is Kiryat Shmona where more than three quarters of the population were forced to leave their homes.
A day after the first video of Haifa was released, the Hezbollah Secretary-General (effectively their supreme leader) Hassan Nasrallah gave an address where he said that:
Hezbollah is capable of reaching every place in Israel with its rockets and UAVs and that it can “shake the foundations” of the country.
“Every rocket and UAV will have a target” as Hezbollah has an extensive bank of targets ready to go.
Israel should “expect us in land, air, and sea” and that Israel knows the IDF will not be able to defend it in a full-scale war with them.
Finally, he also openly threatened Cyprus that it will also be attacked if it allowed Israel to use its airports and military bases.
This is a very significant statement by Nasrallah due to how blunt and brazen it is, especially due to the fact Nasrallah has built himself a reputation over the years as someone who NEVER bluffs and doesn’t say thing unless he knows with certainty that his organisation can and will follow through.
He also would never make such a statement before running it by his own bosses in Iran first. I’ll cover that in the next section.
Given the second video released on July 9 and which appears to have caught Israel completely by surprise (even considering the footage from Haifa released a few weeks prior), it is very safe to assume that when Nasrallah says that “Every rocket and UAV will have a target”, he is not bluffing!
A few days after this address, Israel’s public broadcaster Kan aired an exclusive in their main evening news bulletin, in which their political correspondent said that sources told her that a decision has been made to wind down activities in Gaza and shift the bulk of the effort to dealing with Hezbollah in the north.
She referred to that as “moving to stage three of the war”:
This was confirmed a few days later by Netanyahu himself and soon after, footage such as the one seen below started circulating on social media, showing significant build up of IDF ground forces along the Lebanon border in preparation to what can only be interpreted as a ground invasion.
Hezbollah responded by releasing another video in which it named specific sites they plan to target if Israel invades, amongst them the Dimona Nuclear reactor in southern Israel, located more than 300 Km (186 miles) south of the Lebanese border.
Again, Hezbollah has established its reputation over the years as people who don’t bluff and will not say anything unless they know for a fact they have the capacity (as well as the approval of their masters in Iran) to execute, or at least attempt to do so.
What is Hezbollah?
Well, to start with, the way their name is commonly written in English is wrong.
The way you would write their name in English Alphabet is: 岣zbu 'll膩h, or in simpler way Hizbullah and is comprised of the two words which make their actual name:
Hizb - Party (as in political party); and
Allah - the name of God in Islam.
So: Party of Allah (God). This name was chosen for them by Ayatollah Khomeini himself.
There is no clear consensus on the exact year Hezbollah (or 岣zbu 'll膩h as they are actually called) came into existence but what is known for a fact is that following the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, commonly referred to now as the “First Lebanon War” (the second one took place in 2006 as already mentioned above), Iran sent a contingent of 1,500 Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) instructors to Syria and from there they established themselves in the Beqaa Valley in eastern Lebanon, which was controlled by Syria (a long time ally of the Islamic Republic) at the time.
The goal was to create a militia of local Lebanese Shi’a Muslims that will fight the invading Israeli army.
What is not commonly mentioned in the ‘official’ history of Hizbullah and something I only came across very recently myself, is the idea that Mossad may have played at least some part in its creation!
A decade ago in 2014, Israeli investigative reporting program Uvda (“Fact” in Hebrew) did a report about the personal diary of Miryam Eitan, the wife of Rafi Eitan, one of the Mossad’s most famous operatives ever who first gained prominence as the one who was in command of the eight-man team that captured Adolf Eichmann in Argentina in 1960.
This sentence in that 2014 piece is especially interesting:
“She kept quiet when he (her husband Rafi) would disappear for entire nights in Lebanon where he created a militant Shi’a organisation, which will eventually become Hizbullah”
I KID YOU NOT!
Here is the extract from the article where this is written for all to see:
If you don’t read Hebrew, feel free to run the article through Google Translate to verify that what I said is true. It is also archived here, just in case.
In February 1985, Hizbullah’s first official spokesperson, released publicly an “open letter” which later became the official manifesto of the “Party of God”:
Here are a few extracts from that document:
We are the sons of the umma (Muslim community) ... ... We are an ummah linked to the Muslims of the whole world by the solid doctrinal and religious connection of Islam, whose message God wanted to be fulfilled by the Seal of the Prophets, i.e., Prophet Muhammad. ... As for our culture, it is based on the Holy Quran, the Sunna and the legal rulings of the faqih who is our source of imitation ...
“We see in Israel the vanguard of the United States in our Islamic world. It is the hated enemy that must be fought until the hated ones get what they deserve. This enemy is the greatest danger to our future generations and to the destiny of our lands, particularly as it glorifies the ideas of settlement and expansion, initiated in Palestine, and yearning outward to the extension of the Great Israel, from the Euphrates to the Nile.”
“Our primary assumption in our fight against Israel states that the Zionist entity is aggressive from its inception, and built on lands wrested from their owners, at the expense of the rights of the Muslim people. Therefore our struggle will end only when this entity is obliterated. We recognize no treaty with it, no cease fire, and no peace agreements, whether separate or consolidated.”
Below is an English translation of the full document prepared by the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT) which is based in Israel (so keep that in mind).
As I don’t read Arabic and could not locate the original source document in Arabic, this is all I have to offer. Make of it what you will.
Hizbullah doesn’t provide any information on its funding sources (as you can imagine) but it is widely believed that a lot of it comes from Iran and Shia’s Muslim organisations affiliated with it.
What IS certain though is that essentially all of its weapons come from Iran and that Hizbullah is closely affiliated with Quds (“the holy” in Arabic which refers to Jerusalem) Force, the branch of the IRGC that specialises in unconventional warfare, military Intelligence and extraterritorial operations outside Iran.
The commander of the Quds Force in Syria and Lebanon is effectively the direct boss of the Hizbullah secretary-general, a role that for the last 32 years (since February 1992) is held by Hassan Nasrallah.
Nasrallah is 63 years old now so he has been in this position since he was only 31 years old.
Recent developments
Late last month (June 2024), The Arab Leaguehas announced it no longer considers Hezbollah a terrorist organization, reflecting a shift in regional priorities amid ongoing tensions between Israel and Hezbollah.
Here is the Assistant Secretary-General of the Arab League Hossam Zaki making this statement:
Recent statements by Hezbollah’s leadership
On June 7, Nasrallah’s deputy Sheikh Naim Qassem said that Hizbullah does not seek an all-out war and the goal is only to stop the war in Gaza.
A mere 10 days later on June 17, Hizbullah’s head of Foreign Relations, Khalil Rizk, said that Hizbullah’s real war is with America, not Israel.
The above is definitely not the first time Hizbullah’s senior leadership have made very strong and explicit statements towards the United States.
In January 2020, Nasrallah himself said following the death of the commander of the IRGC's Quds Force Qasem Soleimani (i.e. the boss of Nasrallah’s direct boss) in a US airstrike in Iraq that:
“US officers who came to the region vertically, will return back horizontally"
He also made this hand gesture during the speech in case his words weren’t clear enough:
On June 11, Hizbullah MP (remember that Hizbullah is a political party in Lebanon with significant political clout) Mohammad Raad said in an interview to RT in Arabic that “Hizbullah should invest in Western University students protesting for Palestine”.
He also said that Hizbullah needs to use them in order to “enter the heart of Western societies”.
Hizbullah is by far the most dominant military and political force in Lebanon
While Lebanon is technically a sovereign nation with its own government and military, it is also a failed state.
The Lebanese government is definitely not capable to assert its control over the entire territory (or even parts of the capital Beirut which are completely controlled by Hizbullah) and the Lebanese military is no match to Hizbullah’s military capability.
It has been on the brink of total collapse for years due to lack of funding and as an example, its air force has no fighter jets or attack helicopters (none, zero, nada).
Hizbullah has basically been able to assert their will and dominance over Lebanon’s official institutions and government and has even been implicated with the assassination of Lebanese PM Hariri.
What are Hezbollah’s military capabilities?
Well, instead of getting into the figures and numbers, let’s take a look at what Hezbollah has actually managed to do recently.
In January this year, Hezbollah has managed to hit several of the “defence domes” protecting the IDF’s Northern Aerial Control Unit (also referred to as “Unit 506” or simply “06”).
The IDF has a total of three of these (Northern, Central and Southern) and they are considered units of strategic importance to the Air Force and effectively their ‘eyes and ears’.
I used to work quite closely with “06” myself during my military service.
As usual when Hezbollah scores a major victory such as this, they released a video documenting the ‘event’:
Here is a photo of one of the defence domes being hit (which is unprecedented given the calibre of weapons supposedly protecting these units of “strategic significance”):
The IDF confirmed at the time that there was damage done to the base (hard to deny it when there is footage clearly showing it) but also said that “all systems were fully backed-up” and “the continuity of command and the operations of air defence has not been impacted”.
Even if that’s true, that’s still a very bad look, especially given how many of these rockets and missiles Hezbollah has in their arsenal.
In April this year, Hezbollah managed to shoot down an IDF ‘killer drone’ often used by the IDF for targeted assignations.
The specific drone that was shot down was the Israeli-made Hermes 900 made by major Israeli defence contractor Elbit Systems which has only been declared “fully operational” in 2017.
It is (or at least was I guess) considered “state of the art” killer drone and Israel sold it to many countries and also signed a JV with Indiato manufacture it there.
So much for “state of the art”:
In May this year, Hezbollah has used an FPV (First-person-view) attack drone armed with Russian-made S5 Missiles against an IDF base near the border town of Metula, causing what appears to be significant damage.
Worst yet, the part of the base hit the worst appears to be a system for detecting drones…
Only a few days ago on July 8, Hezbollah conducted what it called their “largest drone attack yet” against various IDF outposts along the border with Lebanon:
Now, while drones are an important part of Hezbollah’s arsenal and also are used for various highly symbolic attacks or sensitive surveillance missions, as discussed in this article (as well as deterrence against Israelfrom assassinating its leaders and military commanders), they will never pose an existential threat.
What absolutely CAN and WILL pose an existential threat to Israel in a full scale war with Hezbollah is its massive arsenal of high precision advanced rockets which are mostly Iranian-made.
It is estimated that Hezbollah has over 200K of those and they are capable of reaching anywhere in Israel as far as range.
The IDF’s own estimates suggest that in the event of a full scale war, which will definitelybe triggered if Israel launches a ground invasion of Lebanon (Hezbollah has made that crystal clear!), Israel (and especially its northern part) may experience a barrage of missiles and rockets as high as 5,000 a day!
For context, Hizbullah fired a total of 4000 rockets during the entire second Lebanon war in 2006 which lasted just over a month.
What’s next?
How the hell would I know?! This is the Middle East after all!
NO ONE can ever know for sure how events will unfold in that part of the world!
However, may I humbly suggest that Israel SERIOUSLY reconsiders a decision to invade Lebanon again.
I thought that the lessons of the Second Lebanon War in 2006 were enough (and are also fairly recent) to understand that doing so will yield ZERO benefits from both a military and moral perspective.
Israel will simply not be able to handle this one and the people who will suffer the most will be the innocent civilians (on all sides)…as usual!!
To allow me to continue this work and expand it further and in pursuit of the mission to “propagate the truth like a MANTRA”, yourfinancial contribution is greatly appreciated.
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