Israel's Armed Quadcopters in Gaza Mark a Dangerous New Era in Drone Warfare

Israel is pioneering yet another deadly innovation in drone warfare. What happens in Gaza won't stay there.

(An Israeli quadcopter seen near the Israel-Gaza border in 2018. AFP via GETTY IMAGES / Said Khatib)

The besieged people of Gaza's Nuseirat refugee camp got a terrifying glimpse this month of the shape of war to come. 

Disturbing sounds of crying infants and women were audible throughout the camp. When they went out to investigate, "Israeli quadcopters reportedly opened fire directly at them," the award-winning Palestinian journalist Maha Hussaini reported for Middle East Eye. The quadcopters – small, cheap, and disposable drones usually used for civilian photography and, more recently, military reconnaissance – had been blasting the sorrowful recordings as a lure. 

Once the lure worked, it created a self-fulfilling prophecy: those who ran to help the fake victims became real ones. Residents struggled to help those real victims as the "quadcopters were firing at anything that moved," eyewitness Samira Abu al-Leil, a 49-year-old Nuseirat resident, told Middle East Eye. 

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Gaza is the scene of Israeli carnage so pitiless that the International Court of Justice in January found it to be plausibly genocidal. Palestinian journalists and health workers on the ground are documenting that it's also something else: a laboratory for the wars of the future. Playing a recording of a crying baby to kill those who seek to save children is a risible cruelty but hardly an innovative one. Arming a quadcopter, however, is an inevitable idea that Israel now appears to have been the first to bring into battlefield usage. And Gaza will by no means be the last conflict where armed quadcopters kill. 

Foreign journalists cannot enter Gaza to see these drones for themselves. Asked for comment on the reports of armed quadcopters, an Israeli military spokesperson told Zeteo, “We do not comment on operational tools.”

Israel’s armed quadcopter innovation is not the only harbinger of future wars at work in or emanating from Gaza. Yuval Abraham, reporting for the Israeli outlets +972 and Local Call, revealed a terrifying targeting artificial intelligence, Lavender, that purports to sift through the accumulated data Israel gathers through surveillance on Gazans and predict who matches the profile of a vaguely defined "militant." Particularly at the beginning of its onslaught through Gaza, Abraham reported, the Israeli military "almost completely relied on Lavender, which clocked as many as 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants." 

Much of the recent focus on emerging Middle Eastern military capabilities – especially where drones are concerned – has been on Iran, not Israel. Iran's contributions to the changing face of drone warfare have come on a larger scale. The Iranian drone air fleet launched against Israel this month – retaliation for the deadly April 1 attack on an Iranian diplomatic facility in Damascus, presumed to be the work of Israel – neither killed anyone nor survived the combined air defenses of Israel, the U.S., UK, France, and Jordan, though shrapnel seriously wounded 7-year-old Amina Hassouna. But a fleet estimated at 170 mid-sized armed drones capable of making a flight more than 620 miles from Iran to Israel is a grim advance in drone history. 

National militaries will have to spend significant portions of their budgets if they wish to purchase or develop a fleet of combat-capable drones, even though those drones are far cheaper than piloted combat aircraft. But tricking a quadcopter out with a gun is something that everyone from sophisticated defense establishments to insurgent, terrorist, militia, and rebel groups will find irresistibly affordable and technologically feasible. Drone experts consider the quadcopter's weaponization to have been a matter of time, following as it does the trends in drone development toward miniaturization and affordability. 

The battlefield emergence of the armed quadcopter is an uncomfortable reminder that the scale of destruction that has prompted observers of Gaza to compare it to 20th-century warfare is being accomplished with the weapons of the 21st – weapons often purported to make warfare more precise, or even more "humane." Instead, the Israeli assault on Gaza is showing us a glimpse of wars simultaneously fought at the scale of AI-generated target selection and, as with the armed quadcopter, with terrifying intimacy. 

“Heavy Gunfire Coming From Above” 

Accounts of quadcopter attacks in Gaza began circulating on social media from Palestinians early in the war. The British-Palestinian surgeon Ghassan Abu-Sittah posted in mid-November that he and his colleagues at al-Ahli hospital had seen "over 20 chest and neck [gunshot] wounds fired from Israeli Quadcopter drones… When it comes to killing they are so innovative."

Hussaini, in January, contributed a thorough report for Middle East Eye about the emergence of quadcopters as an Israeli military tool. She described their contributions to a horrific scene on Jan. 11, on the coastal al-Rashid Street in northern Gaza, in which the Israeli military opened fire on a crowd of hungry people who massed after hearing a truck packed with food was on the way. 

"We were taken by surprise by the heavy gunfire coming from above, there were quadcopters shooting directly at the crowd," eyewitness Qassem Ahmed, 42, told Hussaini, who wrote that the current war is "the first time in the Palestinian territories, remote-controlled quadcopters have been deployed on a large scale against suspected Palestinian fighters and civilians." A similar account, reported from Gaza the next month by Tareq S. Hajjaj in Mondoweiss, quoted 39-year-old Abdallah Shaqqura, whose wife Ulfat was shot multiple times by a quadcopter in front of their 5-year-old son. Ulfat told the boy to run before bleeding out in the street. 

In February, Euro-Med Monitor compiled a study of what they said was "systemati[c]" Israeli usage of the armed quadcopters in Gaza and corroborated accounts of quadcopters opening fire during the Jan. 11 bloodbath on al-Rashid Street. Euro-Med Monitor said it had confirmed "dozens of civilians" targeted and shot by quadcopters "fitted with machine guns and missiles from the Matrice 600 and LANIUS categories, which are highly mobile and versatile, i.e., ideal for short-term operations." Citing the Palestinian Health Ministry, the study reported that health workers in Gaza noticed corpses with "evidence of unusual gunshots," which, according to Euro-Med Monitor, indicated "not bullets fired from rifle-type weapons, but from quadcopter drones.” Hussaini's Middle East Eye colleague in Gaza, Mohammed al-Hajjar, said the quadcopter's rounds resembled nails. 

Among the attacks Euro-Med Monitor documented were a quadcopter shooting into a tent at the al-Shaboura refugee camp in Rafah, killing 17-year-old Elyas Osama Ezz El-Din Abu Jama, "who was mentally and physically disabled," and his 19-year-old brother Muhib. The father of 13-year-old Amir Odeh described seeing his son "suddenly hit by a gunshot from a quadcopter through the window of the room" while the boy was playing with his cousins on the eighth floor of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society's headquarters in Khan Younis. He carried Amir to al-Amal hospital, "where he was proclaimed dead." 

Thaer Ahmad, a Chicago doctor who volunteered at Gaza's Nasser Hospital, recently told The Guardian's Chris McGreal that a drone shot one of his colleagues in the head. The doctor was reported to have survived.

The exact make and model of the quadcopters over Gaza is unknown. But the Matrice 600 referenced by the Euro-Med Monitor is a six-rotor, nine-plus kilogram (19-plus Ib.) drone intended for photography. According to manufacturer DJI's specs, the Matrice 600 has a maximum flight time of 18 minutes when carrying a payload. 

Lanius, made by Israeli drone heavyweight Elbit, is a smaller, loitering robot that can be launched from, apparently, a Matrice-like quadcopter. It's capable of sending a 3-D map of what its camera scans back to its operator. Looking like a Viewfinder of doom, the Lanius flies autonomously – until an operator sends it a command to detonate. After Elbit released a Lanius promotional video in November 2022, tech journalist David Hambling wrote that "the most impressive feature of Lanius is that [it] exists here and now, and may already be in use with Israeli forces." 

DJI and Elbit did not respond to Zeteo’s requests for comment. 

An Aura of Inevitability

"Quadcopter" can be a bit of a misnomer. Some of the drones identified in Palestinian reporting and the Euro-Med Monitor report have appeared to have six rotors, and my experience as a defense reporter for WIRED magazine taught me that some people are very pedantic about these things. But the term "quadcopter" is a catch-all for a small, rotary-winged drone, distinguished from large fixed-wing, missile-armed robotic airframes like the U.S. Predator. 

The quadcopter's battlefield use has usually been to perform reconnaissance. And when it comes to payload, small drones have been rigged for self-detonation for years. The U.S. military has experimented with so-called "loitering munitions" for at least 13 years. Israel deployed loitering munitions in its attack on the Iranian city of Isfahan earlier this month, according to Iranian officials – and has deployed them since at least 2019 in operations in Iran and Lebanon. 

Quadcopters strapped with guns, however, are a newer innovation. Turkey, a recent heavyweight entry into the drone market, unveiled a gun-strapped quadcopter at least five years ago. The U.S. Army? Same. 

The point here is not that armed quadcopters like those the Israeli military reportedly uses in Gaza are unprecedented. It's that they are very, very precedented, to the degree that they have the aura of inevitability. 

Russia's assault on Ukraine is another merciless conflict that is yielding drone creativity from military necessity. There, Russian forces have used small "first-person-view" drones, rigged to explode, to cripple U.S. and German-supplied tanks. As Lara Jakes of the New York Times recently observed, that means a $500 robotic munition is defeating a $10 million armored vehicle. 

Still, Sam Bendett, a defense analyst at the influential CNA think tank who pays close attention to battlefield developments in the Ukraine war, considers the armed quadcopter an "emerging technology," not yet one that various governments or militias actively employ in combat. "There are experiments and examples of larger, heavier Ukrainian drones equipped with machine guns. It’s not clear yet how widespread this tactic is across the front," he told me. Considering his area of focus, Bendett wasn't familiar with the reported use of armed quadcopters by Israel in Gaza. But he commented that "Israel's UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle] capabilities are very advanced, so it's not surprising." 

Among the problems with arming a small drone with a gun is recoil, which will affect accuracy. Larger and heavier drones are better equipped to deal with that than small quadcopters, Bendett said. "You want to make sure that whatever you do, you fire precisely," he noted. 

Gaza as a Proving Ground

Drone warfare began in the Middle East. With a November 2002 strike in Yemen from a flimsy robotic airframe carrying an anti-tank missile, the U.S. inaugurated a new method of assassination from a distance. Israel, another drone pioneer, first used drones in the 1973 Yom Kippur War and its 1982 invasion of Lebanon as decoys to confuse air defenses in Syrian-controlled parts of the country. The Israeli military added strikes into its drone repertoire during the Second Palestinian Intifada in the early 2000s. 

Twenty years later, armed drone usage is unremarkable, if no less terrifying. Militaries looking to add aerial capability but without the money or the industrial resources for piloted fighter aircraft instead pay hundreds of thousands or low millions of dollars for an Iranian Shahed or Turkey's wildly popular Bayraktar-TB2. Across the African continent, 149 civilians died from drone strikes in 2020. Last year, that figure rose to 1,418 people, Bloomberg recently reported, citing the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project.

The subjugation of Palestine rendered it a military proving ground long before Oct. 7. Israel’s "occupation, in the West Bank and Gaza, is the perfect place to develop and test new weapons systems including surveillance drones, intelligence gathering tools and artificial intelligence weapons," Antony Loewenstein, author of the 2023 book The Palestine Laboratory, said in a Q&A with the book’s publisher last October. “Once they’ve been used against Palestinians, the relevant companies market them at global weapons fairs” as “battle-tested.” 

Elbit, maker of the Lanius, manufactured the first drones that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security tested over the U.S.-Mexico border. Israel has become the ninth-biggest arms dealer in the world, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Its clientele includes some of the “most repressive regimes on the planet, including Myanmar and Saudi Arabia, [which] have purchased Israeli tech and weapons in the last decade with the authority and encouragement" of the Israelis, according to Loewenstein. 

As the drones miniaturize alongside their options for carrying lethal payloads, militias will follow the same economic logic as national militaries, just on a different scale, like a Moore's Law of death. Only this time, drone warfare may be a ground-up development, as modifications on commercially available quadcopters prove a viable, cheap workaround to export controls surrounding larger lethal drones. And the devolution and normalization of drone use don't stop with rebel groups. The War on Terror demonstrated how battlefield innovations for well-funded militaries find their way to local law enforcement. 

On April 11, Ghassan Abu-Sittah became rector of the University of Glasgow. In his address, he reflected on the solidarity he had seen so many of the peoples of the world extend to Palestine. He attributed some of it to an understanding that what happens in Gaza will not stay there. 

"[T]hey understood that the weapons that Benjamin Netanyahu uses today are the weapons that Narendra Modi will use tomorrow," Abu-Sittah said. "The quadcopters and drones fitted with sniper guns…used today in Gaza will be used tomorrow in Mumbai, in Nairobi and in Sao Paulo. Eventually, like the facial recognition software developed by the Israelis, they will come to Easterhouse and Springburn." 

The next day, the German government refused Abu-Sittah entry at Berlin Brandenburg Airport, preventing him from attending the Palestine Congress conference. 

Spencer Ackerman is a Pulitzer Prize and National Magazine Award-winning reporter and the author of Reign of Terror: How The 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump. He has reported from Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, and many U.S. bases, ships, and submarines. He is also the author of the FOREVER WARS newsletter on Ghost.