By: Tal Beeri & Dana Polak Kanarik
On June 2, a Hezbollah UAV fell in a public park in Nahariya, causing a fire.
A video captured by city residents and shared on social media shows the interception efforts in the sky, followed by a UAV plummeting to the ground. From the footage it unclear if the UAV’s descend was an intentional dive to the ground in order to explode, whether the UAV was damaged by an action taken against it (some interception), or whether the UAV crashed due to a technical fault.
The IDF reported that unsuccessful interception attempts had been made toward an UAV over Nahariya.
On June 3, a day later, Hezbollah claimed responsibility for UAV attack, according to its announcement, against a target in the southern community of Liman (north of Nahariya).
Hezbollah usually elaborates on the target it managed to strike in order to laud its accomplishments and even occasionally releases a video describing the target and documentation of the operation. Furthermore, Hezbollah releases a claim of responsibility shortly after each strike to preserve credibility. In this incident, Hezbollah also refrained from specifying the target that was “successfully” struck, and also claimed responsibility only the next day, raising questions about the strike and its effectiveness.
To date, Hezbollah has carried out suicide UAV attacks against military and quality targets. Hezbollah claimed responsibility and announced an attack on the Sky Dew system, the Elbit factory, attacks on Iron Dome battery sites and other military sites using suicide UAVs.
Hezbollah tends to claim responsibility for every suicide UAV attack, and in other cases where the UAV mission fails: When the UAV is intercepted or does not strike its target, Hezbollah refrains from claiming responsibility. In addition, Hezbollah does not take responsibility for UAVs that are not intended for attack, such as UAVs intended for intelligence and observation.
At this stage, we do not know the type and model of the UAV that exploded in the park in Nahariya.
It is possible that the target of Hezbollah’s UAV was a military target in the Western Galilee region, or, as stated in Hezbollah’s claim of responsibility: “against a target in the southern part of the community of Liman,” but due to a navigation error, or due to GPS jams in the area, or due to another malfunction/failure, it reached its target in a park in the city of Nahariya.
After Hezbollah saw that damage had been caused, a fire broke out, and the incident was widely documented on social networks and in the Israeli media, it decided to issue a claim of responsibility.
It is possible that the claim of responsibility and Hezbollah’s announcement actually highlights the fact that the city of Nahariya was not the target.
for the avoidance of doubt, Hezbollah does not refrain from hitting civilian targets. Since the beginning of the war, more than 45% of Hezbollah’s attacks were intended to target civilian targets. However, the advantage of using an attack UAV in the manner that Hezbollah has done so far, is its precision, particularly against military objectives.
In recent months, Hezbollah has increased its use of UAVs, both for attack purposes and for other purposes. In May 2024, there were 85 incidents of UAV infiltrations into Israel, of which Hezbollah claimed responsibility for 25 attacks using attacking UAVs (suicide bombers and rocket/bomb launchers).
In recent months, several UAVs have been intercepted over the Haifa Bay area (Nahariya / Acre / Krayot), an area beyond Hezbollah’s range of attacks – more than 5 km from the borderline. Since the beginning of the war to date, Hezbollah has not launched any kind directly at Nahariya, Acre, and the Krayot area. Therefore, if in these events Hezbollah did try to carry out attacks, this marks an increase in Hezbollah’s range of fire. However, in our understanding, in these cases, they were not attacking UAVs, and therefore, it cannot be declared that Hezbollah is increasing the range of fire.
Hezbollah is preparing for a full-scale war against Israel, and it continues to study the IDF’s capabilities, look for weak points improving its learning process.
