Israel's military has tools to take down Hamas' new drone arsenal, but actually using them may not be easy

• Israel is poised to launch a ground operation in the Gaza Strip following an attack by Hamas.
• In the decade since the last major IDF operation in Gaza, Hamas has acquired a number of drones.
• Israel has counter-drone capabilities, but using them effectively in urban combat may be difficult.

Israel has been a pioneer in drone warfare, producing an array of reconnaissance and strike drones. But when Israeli troops enter Gaza in retaliation for Hamas' slaughter of more than 1,300 Israeli civilians, it will be their turn to face a threat from unmanned aerial vehicles.

Hamas is likely to unleash hundreds of UAVs, and experts question how prepared the Israel Defense Forces are to meet them. With Israel also making ample use of unmanned aircraft, an IDF ground invasion of Gaza will be a clash of drones like that in Ukraine, where videos of each side's drones attacking the other's troops have become commonplace.

Echoes of the Ukraine war were evident on October 7, when Hamas smashed through Israeli defenses and fanned through border communities. The assault began with a Hamas drone that dropped a bomb on an Israeli Merkava 4 tank, one of the most advanced in the world. Its hard to say how much damage was done to the tank, but it was abandoned. Other drones knocked out communications towers and gun emplacements.

The full breadth of Hamas' drone arsenal will not become evident until Israel attacks. But analysts suggest Hamas has both commercial off-the-shelf drones as well as loitering munitions (also known as one-way attack or "kamikaze" drones), likely developed with Iranian help. The first Hamas drones appeared in 2014, when a few were launched from Gaza into Israel.

Knocking out a Merkava tank indicates greater skill and boldness in Hamas' drone use, though it enjoyed the advantage of surprise against IDF troops. Either way, urban battles are already the toughest of all military operations. Fighting in Gaza — a densely populated area with 2 million inhabitants crammed into 141 square miles — will be particularly challenging.

Facing large numbers of drones in an urban labyrinth will only complicate the problem. Quietly slipping a platoon through back alleys is even more difficult when the enemy constantly has camera-equipped quadcopters overhead or kamikaze drones ready to strike.

"As a rapidly growing feature of warfare, recent urban battles have incorporated drones more to a much greater degree than anything the IDF has faced before," John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, wrote in a recent article outlining the challenges Israeli troops would face Gaza.

During Russia's attack on Kyiv early in its invasion last year, Ukraine made devastating use of drones, from missile-armed Turkish TB2 Bayraktars "to made-from-scratch quadcopters to strike targets, call for indirect fire, and anticipate the movement of the Russian forces," Spencer wrote.

ISIS also used drones widely in urban combat in northern Iraq in the mid-2010s.

"Iraqi forces really struggled to watch the threats that might come out of any doorway or window in front of them and the IEDs that might be below them and keep an eye on what might come above them. It becomes overwhelming," Jack Watling, a defense expert at Britain's Royal United Services Institute think tank, said at a recent event hosted by the Wilson Center in Washington DC.

The question is whether the IDF has "the division of responsibilities in their units" to look for each of those threats and whether its troops can take down drones they spot, Watling said. "If they have that, it's a manageable problem at the tactical level, but if you don't have that and it's not well integrated then it will be a cause of additional attrition."

About one-quarter of Israel's $13 billion in defense exports in 2022 were drones. Israeli defense firms have also developed a variety of counter-drone systems, from jammers to cannon. These sorts of systems are effective — electronic warfare has taken a huge toll against drones in Ukraine.

But these countermeasures have limitations. Anti-drone cannons don't infinite ammunition to engage swarms of small UAVs. Jamming can bring down both enemy and friendly drones. Early in its invasion of Ukraine, the Russian military's electronic warfare was disrupting its own communications and GPS.

No military — whether it's the rapidly innovating Ukrainians or the well-resourced Americans — has been able to totally defend its troops against drones at all times. Technologies such as lasers may help someday, but not in time for an Israeli assault on Gaza.

Israel's counter-UAV skills may also not be evenly distributed among its troops. The IDF does have counter-drone capabilities, "but they are generally held at quite high echelon, and that's partly a result of them having a mostly conscript force," Watling said.

"The level of training in the IDF in terms of the breadth of skill set that each soldier has is actually quite limited because they tend to keep people as reserves" and train them for specific tasks, Watling said. "What that leads to is that you end up with kernels of excellence but the level of integration is actually less than in some Western forces that have a higher proportion of professional troops."

Israel does have some advantages. A Gaza campaign would be fought in a confined space close to Israeli bases, and its impressive technology industry may provide some clever counter-drone solutions, but Hamas' drones are likely to make a battle for Gaza into a bloodier fight.

Michael Peck is a defense writer whose work has appeared in Forbes, Defense News, Foreign Policy magazine, and other publications. He holds a master's in political science. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.