The Lethal Buzz of Israeli Drones Over Gaza

The sound is constant, metallic. A thin whine that slices through the air and promises nothing good. Children learn to recognize it early; the older ones know the danger that comes from above. It is the sound of Israeli drones. Small, agile, armed. They fly low, scraping antennas on rooftops and peering into windows. They are not looking for fighters. They are looking for bodies.

For months, the Strip has been the laboratory for a technological war that does not need soldiers in flesh and blood to enter homes. All it takes is an operator behind a screen, a high-definition camera and an algorithm to track movement. Then the shot is fired. There is no warning, no escape. The trigger is pulled by an invisible, remote finger. The target is often an entire family.

Euro-Med Monitor offers an example in the case of Silah Muhammad Ahmad Odeh, a 52-year-old woman killed May 21, 2024, in front of her family by direct fire from an Israeli drone. She had been trying to flee the Jabalia refugee camp, waving a white flag.

From Eyes in the Sky to Instruments of Autonomous Death

Remotely controlled aircraft have become instruments of autonomous death, capable of striking, killing, and terrorizing. Many of these attacks have been carried out with the SMASH Dragon system, a weapon module produced by Smart Shooter, an Israeli company specializing in automatic targeting technologies. The system has been mounted on drones like the Matrice 600 and the Thor, aircraft built to be versatile and lightweight, perfect for rapid operations. They can enter a narrow alley, fly just a few feet off the ground, lock onto a target, and fire — with no margin for error.

Euro-Med Monitor has recorded dozens of similar cases. Men, women, and children struck in the street by automatic machine guns installed under small drones. No uniformity in the targets. No apparent rules. Sometimes it is enough just to be in the wrong place — a gathering, a line in front of a water tanker, a mother running, an old man praying. Clean, cold-blooded shots.

Meanwhile, entire neighborhoods are struck daily. The attacks have destroyed hospitals, schools, and mosques. Simultaneously, drones penetrate homes, film from the inside, and send recorded messages with evacuation orders. Then, just minutes later, the missile arrives. No legal recourse. Only orders and obedience.

Even commercial DJI drones, designed for tourist filming, have been converted into weapons of war. They mount thermal cameras, carry small ordnance, and become messengers of death in real time. The war industry has reshaped them with the same ease as modifying a smartphone app. A tap on the screen. Another family destroyed.

There is a surgical ferocity in this war. No blind fire. No trenches. Here, death is remote-controlled, silent, inhuman. It does not arrive screaming. It whispers. The precision of these killings, often premeditated, points to another kind of logic — one of efficiency. Extrajudicial execution becomes standard operating procedure. Technology replaces judgment. And judgment, by now, is not even human anymore.

This has transformed the Gaza Strip into a laboratory for testing the possibilities of a war without limits, where the enemy is anyone under the electronic eye of a drone. It has become a firing range, and the drones an extension of an ideology that accepts the death of civilians as necessary collateral damage and measures victory in bodies, not lives saved.

The Transformation of Violence Into Sniper Drones

Violence sheds its skin, becoming a silent instrument of death, mocking the law. In Gaza, during the summer of 2024, a British surgeon who worked at Nasser Hospital in central Gaza between August and September witnessed this metamorphosis firsthand: clean, almost surgical wounds inflicted by sniper drones. In his testimony before the International Development Committee of his country's Parliament, he stated that he had treated numerous injuries caused by Israel's use of these new lethal devices.

It is not just him saying this. Ghassan Abu Sitta, a British-Palestinian surgeon at Al Ahli Hospital in the northern Strip, also reported drones hovering “near the hospital” and firing “single bullets.” In a voice message to the Telegraph, he said he had received injured people who testified to being shot at by drones in the street.

Drones move at will, low in the sky, like technological vultures. They do not bomb. They fire a single shot with surgical precision — men, women, anyone attempting to cross a street, step out of a doorway or aid the wounded. The sniper drone, as it has come to be called in Gaza, does not just survey. It aims, calibrates and pulls the trigger.

On October 9, 2024, Fatma Daama recorded a voice message for NPR. She was in Jabalia, 37 years old, her voice steady. She spoke of the curfew imposed by Israeli tanks. Then she was interrupted. Four sharp cracks sounded in the background. “Do you hear that?” she said. “That’s the quadcopter. It’s here most of the time. If I go to the door to get better cell service, the quadcopter starts shooting at me and I have to go back inside. It’s very dangerous.” That drone, for those living under the bombs in Gaza, is an aerial executioner, a built-in weapon that spits death with a single, precise detonation. No implication. No doubt. Just technology applied to selective elimination.

Adeeb Shaqfa, a 55-year-old man, lost his 32-year-old son, Saher, in a similar attack. In an account given to NPR, he said he and his son were walking in Rafah, in southern Gaza. He described a quiet afternoon, with no fighting nearby, when a sniper drone appeared and shot Saher, who was walking ahead of him. “Two men rushed to help him, but the drone shot them too,” Shaqfa said. “The drone kept firing at anyone who tried to help him.” Subsequently, the Israeli army declared that it was unaware of the incident, which, it said, “is in no way in line with IDF directives and protocols.” It further stated that any insinuation regarding an alleged intention to harm civilians is baseless and unfounded.

Faced with such testimonies, Israel adopts an attitude of indifference. During an interview conducted by Ailsa Chang, Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon said he could not answer specific questions about the use of sniper drones. He asserted that Israel is using sophisticated weapons to minimize civilian casualties and that the availability of advanced weaponry helps to target and eliminate terrorists, the primary objective of its operations. The Israeli army has provided no answers regarding the possibility of verifying the use of sniper drone technology in Gaza.

Yet the technology pertaining to sniper drones — distinct from other armed drones that frequently carry explosive ordnance — does exist. Furthermore, videos released by some drone manufacturers and the Israeli Ministry of Defense suggest that the Israeli army has possessed and utilized it for some time.

In 2014, a group of veterans from Israeli special forces units founded Duke Robotics, a company based in the United States. Years later, they announced the TIKAD, a small drone with an integrated camera and light weaponry. It can fire mid-flight, thanks to a system that compensates for recoil. A 2018 promotional video describes it as “the soldier of the future,” capable of operating in areas where it is not advisable to send human soldiers. The footage shows trained personnel using it on a firing range. The drone hovers. It fires. It hits. The video states that the company “is fulfilling orders for the Israeli armed forces.”

Around the same time, the Israeli Ministry of Defense shared an illustrative video with the Israeli press showcasing some of its latest technologies. The footage depicted soldiers using one of Duke Robotics’ sniper drones, engaged in striking targets on an open firing range. It is a new approach to warfare: an operator, a screen, a point to eliminate. No sweat, no screams, just the mechanical sound of a target acquired.

Suicide Drones Hit Without Distinction

We are inexorably reaching a point where human control over killing practices in war and the decision-making process regarding who lives and who dies is progressively diminishing. In the early hours of April 17, 2025, children lost their lives in an attack in central Gaza. There were four of them. Children playing among the tents of displaced people when the buzzing sound was heard. Then the explosion. Their bodies, torn apart and burned, arrived at the Shuhada'a Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah. Witnesses recount an Israeli drone hovering above them, waiting, and then striking.

This suggests that these are not conventional drones, and however unbelievable it may seem given the already high level of brutality, their deployment in Gaza marks a disturbing evolution in the occupation conflict. They are called loitering munitions, but are more commonly known as suicide drones. As soon as they detect movement, a group, a human presence, they self-destruct. They are designed for this. And when they explode, they leave no margin for error.

That same morning, Al Jazeera broadcast a statement provided by the Israeli army, according to which its air force had struck more than 110 targets across the Strip in the past two days. Inevitably, the deaths of these four children and many other civilians must fall within these operations.

The subsequent and paradoxical Israeli assertion that "significant progress has been made to minimize civilian casualties" clashes starkly with military operations that involve detonating drones in close proximity to civilian encampments.

Human control in the Gaza massacre has become a formality. A marginal oversight. The killing is managed by algorithms, by automatisms designed to reduce reaction times and increase the efficiency of the strike.

In 2018, Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) tested the Rotem L drone in the southern occupied West Bank. A device designed for urban environments. Small, maneuverable, with a 6.5-kilo warhead and a flight endurance of 45 minutes. It can hover, select a target, pursue it, and finally crash. It is launched by a single soldier. It takes just a few minutes. Just a few hours of training are sufficient. It is a weapon conceived for environments like Gaza, where uninhabited areas do not exist, where life is now forced to compress itself between rubble and tents, and where any crowd can become a target.

The problem is not just technical. It is philosophical, cultural. It is the very idea that the elimination of a human being can be delegated to software, without the need for evaluation, without mediation. As if life were a variable to be balanced in an algorithm.

The suicide drone is convenient, impersonal. It does not risk a pilot's life. It does not compel moral reflection. It is launched and does what it was programmed to do. Any soldier can pick it up, launch it, kill with it. It is a remote execution. A judgment without trial. Its operational effectiveness is undisputed. What is striking is the logic underpinning its use, which is to annihilate the enemy and, with them, the very possibility of discerning between combatant and civilian. Every gathering becomes suspect. Every group of children can be interpreted as a threat. A further reason for Israel's increasing use of suicide drones lies in their economic advantage. Unlike jets and missiles that require imported components, drones like the Rotem L are domestically manufactured. Their production costs are contained, allowing for large-scale deployment. Some drones can even be carried in a backpack, enabling entire infantry teams to carry out their own airstrikes autonomously.

Some might argue that drones have the capability to distinguish faces using artificial intelligence, and that, as reported by The New York Times, few nations have experimented with the technology as extensively as Israel, which has developed novel facial recognition systems and expanded surveillance of Palestinians since the beginning of the Gaza genocide. If this were confirmed, the decision to strike gatherings of displaced civilians would take on an even more sinister connotation. Since these are not isolated incidents, the damage inflicted by these drones does not appear accidental, but rather the result of deliberate attacks. The victims are not "collateral damage," but designated targets.

In other conflicts, this technology is used to reduce civilian casualties. High-resolution cameras serve to identify military targets. Tracking systems avoid carpet bombing. But in Gaza, the numbers show that the majority of victims are women and children. Most Israeli attacks occur in public spaces, where the distinction between combatants and civilians is easily made. Tents for the displaced, queues for flour, school courtyards are hit. Places where even a rudimentary algorithm would recognize that there are no military targets. This is not a mistake. When an armed drone flies for several minutes over a camp, films in high definition, analyzes movements, then decides to explode in the middle of a crowd, that is not an unintended consequence. It is a choice.

What Does International Law Say?

Yet, international humanitarian law clearly establishes the obligation to distinguish between military objectives and the civilian population. Suicide drones, by their operational nature, violate this fundamental principle. These are weapon systems that rely on sensors to make lethal decisions, despite the evident fact that no current technology can assess an individual's status with the precision required by the laws of war.

According to the Geneva Conventions and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, the indiscriminate use of such weapons constitutes a war crime and a crime against humanity. Since October 7, 2023, their deployment in the Gaza Strip has taken on characteristics that fall within the definition of genocide, as demonstrated by the repeated attacks against the civilian population. The technical inability to distinguish between combatants and civilians is particularly evident in situations where entire families seek refuge under makeshift shelters.

The consequences, documented and irrefutable, enumerate a disproportionate number of civilian casualties, annihilated families, and an entire generation of children forced to live under the constant threat of sudden attacks.

Israeli military operations are changing the very nature of warfare, moving beyond simple conflict between armies. They are seeping into the fabric of daily life, blurring the lines between combatant and civilian. Technology, a tool meant for progress, is becoming a vehicle for a new kind of violence, where surgical precision translates into targeted lethality against those seeking shelter.

The skies over Gaza, once a promise of freedom, are now filled with electronic eyes and algorithmic justice that silently and relentlessly decides who will live and who will die. To die without seeing anyone's face. Without a voice. Without a name. With a drone hovering overhead and a decision made elsewhere. Quickly. Silently.

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