After damning report on drone threat, PM says working on solution

Israeli defense officials are actively working on solutions to the threat of small drones operated by private civilians, the Prime Minister’s Office said Wednesday, in response to a State Comptroller report that found Israel’s security services have failed to adequately confront the threats to public safety posed by the technology.

Though it has been working on the problem for over a year, the military has yet to find a comprehensive way to address this threat, State Comptroller Yosef Shapira concluded.

“The issue of drones is well-known and being dealt with and Israel is a world pioneer in finding an answer to the problem,” the Prime Minister’s Office said in a statement.

In June, the cabinet discussed the matter during a meeting of the National Security Council, the PMO noted. The prime minister instructed the National Security Council, together with the Defense Ministry and the Public Security Ministry, to advance plans to tackle the drone issue.

Netanyahu has also been in contact with other countries who are facing the same problem, the statement said.

According to the comptroller report, while the Israel Defense Forces is clearly expected to confront drones flown by terrorist groups, it is unclear which security service is responsible for UAVs flown by Israelis inside Israel. The army sees this as the police’s domain, as it is a civilian matter, while the police see it as the army’s since it is responsible for securing the country’s airspace.

There is currently no registration required for drones that are flown for non-commercial reasons, which represents the vast majority of the devices. According to the comptroller, some 98.6 percent of the 20,000 drones estimated to be in Israel are entirely unknown to regulators.

“The significance is that there exists a vacuum in the areas of responsibility and authority, and as a result there’s no way to give an adequate response at the national level to the threat of drones that originate in the State of Israel, which raises the risk of harming state security,” the comptroller report said.

In recent years, the number of security incidents involving drones — like flying them into the path of airplanes — rose steadily, from one case in 2014 to 14 in 2015 and 24 in 2016. And as more people start flying more drones with limited supervision, there is no reason to expect this trend to change.

The reported noted a number of examples over the past two years of UAVs being flown too close to the Ben Gurion International Airport and other smaller regional airfields, which threatened the safety of incoming and outgoing planes.