Israel sold south Lebanon as a buffer zone; Hezbollah turned it into a drone range and left the IDF hiding under fishing nets. Right, so Hezbollah’s explosive drones are damaging seventy to eighty per cent of the Israeli army’s freedom of action inside their so-called security strip in south Lebanon. Seventy to eighty per cent of what Israel is trying to do by day in the very strip it occupied to prove it had the north under control. Daylight operations are being pushed into the night. Some activity is being cancelled altogether. Anti-drone kit is short enough that smart sights and shotguns are being handed out to individual soldiers in each company, as if the mighty army of miracle technology has reached the point where the solution is one bloke with a better gun and a prayer. Well it isn’t getting them very far. Break out your tiny violins folks. Hezbollah is flying cheap explosive FPV drones, small first-person-view drones as that stands for, all controlled by an operator watching through the drone’s own camera, and Israel is now planning around whether one of those little things is about to come over the field their stood in and ruin their day, possibly permanently. But Hezbollah’s drones are not just scoring the odd hit and giving people a clip for social media. They are doing something much worse for Israel, because they are changing what the Israeli army can safely do in broad daylight. A drone that costs about five hundred dollars is being used against vehicles, troop positions, artillery kit and Iron Dome-linked targets that belong to one of the most heavily armed militaries on earth. Five hundred dollars, in military terms, is not a weapon system, it is an insult with propellers. Israel can spend years telling the world it has the region’s most advanced defences, the best sensors, the cleverest systems, the smartest battlefield brain, and then a cheap drone turns a multimillion dollar static asset into a crisp.