Netanyahu says he warned about drone threat 6 years ago, doesn’t address why solution not found

Speaking at the weekly cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seeks to get ahead of growing criticism that Israel failed to prepare for the Hezbollah drone threat.

“Six years ago, in a cabinet meeting, I warned about the threat of drones,” he says. “At the time, I first saw it as a serious threat as a tool for assassinating individuals, but since then, of course, it has evolved.”

He doesn’t address why, during his years in office since that meeting, Israel hasn’t come up with a solution to the drone threat to IDF soldiers and residents of northern Israel. An IDF officer was killed on Friday in southern Lebanon, the latest Israeli casualty of Hezbollah drones.

“From the beginning of the war, and of course after I saw the war in Ukraine, I thought this could also serve as a tool on our battlefield,” says Netanyahu, who has a rather strained relationship with Kyiv, a world leader in tactical drone defense. “At my request, the IDF installed protective canopies on the tanks.”

“The IDF and the Defense Ministry have done many things over the years — it’s important to understand this — and they have thwarted many hundreds, if not thousands, of attempts to strike our forces using UAVs and drones,” Netanyahu insists. “And they are succeeding. Every time there is a new threat, they succeed in thwarting it.”

Netanyahu says he convened a special team to confront the fiber-optic drone threat from Hezbollah, which has met three times in the last two weeks.

“The best minds in the country, and in my opinion the best minds in the world,” he says.

“At a meeting we held a few days ago, I told them something that surprised them a little – ‘You have no budget limit,'” he says. “Whatever it costs, it costs. And you also have no limitations, as I know, in creativity and imagination — because you are the best in the world. Therefore, my instruction to the team is to provide a solution for this as well as for the next threat that will come.”

He promises that Israel will find “a complete solution to this problem.”

“It requires patience and sometimes gritted teeth,” says Netanyahu, “but we have both those things in abundance: patience, determination, and the ability to meet the challenge. We will achieve this, too.”