Yuval Abraham
The
Israeli army is weaponizing Chinese-made drones to police expulsion orders
across Gaza, with soldiers saying they deliberately target civilians so others
will ‘learn’ not to return, an investigation reveals.
A rendering of an EVO drone hovering over the ruins of Khan Younis, Sourthern Gaza Strip, February 11, 2025
The Israeli military has
weaponized a fleet of Chinese-manufactured commercial drones to attack
Palestinians in parts of Gaza that it seeks to depopulate, an investigation by
+972 Magazine and Local Call can reveal. According to interviews with seven soldiers
and officers who served in the Strip, these drones are operated manually by
troops on the ground, and are frequently used to bomb Palestinian civilians —
including children — in an effort to force them to leave their homes or prevent
them from returning to evacuated areas.
Soldiers most commonly use EVO
drones, produced by the Chinese company Autel, which are primarily intended for
photography and cost around NIS 10,000 (approximately $3,000) on Amazon.
However, with a military-issued attachment known internally as an “iron ball,”
a hand grenade can be affixed to the drone and dropped with the push of a
button to detonate on the ground. Today, the majority of Israeli military
companies in Gaza use these drones.
S., an Israeli soldier who served
in the Rafah area this year, coordinated drone attacks in a neighborhood of the
city that the army had ordered to be evacuated. During the nearly 100 days that
his battalion operated there, soldiers conducted dozens of drone strikes,
according to daily reports from his battalion commander that +972 and Local
Call reviewed.
In the reports, all Palestinians
killed were listed as “terrorists.” However, S. testified that aside from one
person found with a knife and a single encounter with armed fighters, the
scores of others killed — an average of one per day in his battalion’s combat
zone — were unarmed. According to him, the drone strikes were carried out with
the intent to kill, despite the majority of victims being located at such a
distance from the soldiers that they could not have posed any threat.
“It was clear that they were
trying to return to their homes — there’s no question,” he explained. “None of
them were armed, and nothing was ever found near their bodies. We never fired
warning shots. Not at any point.”
Because the Palestinians were
killed far from where the soldiers were positioned, S. said that their corpses
weren’t collected; instead, the army left them to be eaten by stray dogs. “You
could see it on the drone footage,” he explained. “I couldn’t bring myself to
watch a dog eating a body, but others around me watched it. The dogs have
learned to run toward areas where there’s shooting or explosions — they
understand it probably means there’s a body there.”
Soldiers testified that these
drone strikes are often carried out against anyone entering an area the army
has determined is off-limits to Palestinians — a designation that is never
demarcated on the ground. Two sources used variations of the phrase “learning
through blood” to describe the army’s expectation that Palestinians will come
to understand these arbitrary boundaries after civilians are killed upon
entering the area.
“There were many incidents of
dropping grenades from drones,” said H., a soldier who served in the Nuseirat
area in central Gaza. “Were they aimed at armed militants? Definitely not. Once
a commander defines an imaginary red line that no one is allowed to cross,
anyone who does is marked for death,” even just for “walking in the street.”
In several cases, S. said,
Israeli troops deliberately targeted children. “There was a boy who entered the
[off-limits] zone. He didn’t do anything. [Other soldiers] claimed to have seen
him standing and talking to people. That’s it — they dropped a grenade from a
drone.” In another incident, he said, soldiers tried to kill a child riding a
bicycle a great distance away from them.
“In most cases, there was nothing
you could tell yourself,” S. continued. “There was no way to complete the
sentence, ‘We killed them because…’”
A., an officer who was involved
in operations around Khan Younis this year, said that a primary goal of these
attacks was to ensure that neighborhoods were emptied, or remained empty, of
Palestinians. In June, his unit flew a drone into a residential area that the
army had ordered to be evacuated the previous month. Soldiers stood at the
city’s outskirts, watching a small screen showing live footage from the drone
to see who was still in the neighborhood.
“Whoever they spot, they kill,”
A. testified. “If people are moving around there — it’s a threat.” He said the
assumption is that any civilian who remained in the area after evacuation
orders “is either not innocent or will learn through blood [that they must
leave].”
Earlier this month, the
Palestinian journalist Younis Tirawi published footage he had obtained of one
of these drones dropping a grenade, which according to him targeted civilians
in the Netzarim Corridor in northern Gaza. On the drone controller screen, the
text “Iron ball drop device” appears. Based on the interface design and
additional images reviewed by +972 and Local Call, there is strong evidence
that the drone was an Autel model.
‘It resembles a miniature
airport’
According to soldiers who spoke
to +972 and Local Call, the main benefit of using commercial drones like the
EVO model manufactured by Autel is that they are vastly cheaper than the
military-grade equivalents. For example, the Elbit Hermes 450 model (also known
as “Zik”) operated by the Israeli Air Force costs around $2 million per drone.
The commercial models can also be quickly re-armed, and are operated on the
ground by soldiers using joysticks, without requiring approval from a strike
command center.
“The reason everyone is using
them now is that they’re dirt cheap,” said L., who served in Gaza last year.
“From an infantry perspective, suddenly you can use way more firepower, much
more easily.”
Indeed, commercial drones
converted into weapons have become common on modern battlefields because they
offer a low-cost, accessible alternative to traditional airstrikes. Both
Ukraine and Russia have used Chinese-made DJI drones in the current war in eastern
Europe, outfitted with 3D-printed mounts to carry grenades and other
explosives. In May, after China discovered that Ukraine was using commercial
drones for military purposes, it banned their sale to the country, according to
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Hamas has also used explosive
drones, both on October 7 and in operations against Israeli forces in Gaza. But
at the start of the current war, the Israeli military had almost no cheap
drones for its own ground forces. “Because Hamas attacked us with drones,
everyone was talking from day one about how we didn’t have any,” said E., a
soldier who served in Gaza shortly after October 7. “We tried to raise money to
buy drones. Everyone got what they could.”
In the first months of the war,
Israeli army units received ample donations from the general public, mostly in
Israel and the United States. Alongside food and shampoo, drones were among the
items that soldiers requested the most.
“Soldiers independently launched
crowdfunding campaigns,” L. explained. “Our company received around NIS 500,000
(approximately $150,000) in donations, which we also used to buy drones.” C.,
another soldier, recalled being asked to sign thank-you letters to Americans
who had donated EVO drones to his battalion.
In a Facebook group named “The
Israeli Drone Pilots Community,” many posts request EVO drone donations for
units in Gaza. Multiple pages on Headstart (an Israeli crowdfunding startup)
were also created to independently raise funds for drone purchases.
Eventually, the army began
supplying drones directly to soldiers. As the Israeli outlet Globes previously
reported, the military placed orders for thousands of Chinese-made drones,
including models produced by Autel. Initially, these drones were used for
reconnaissance: scanning buildings before soldiers entered them. But over time,
more units received “iron ball” devices from the army and converted drones from
intelligence tools into deadly weapons.
While the army normally deploys
larger military-grade drones from outside of Gaza, Ynet military analyst Ron
Ben-Yishai, who visited an Israeli army base in northern Gaza in early July,
described soldiers operating “all kinds of drones: surveillance, suicide, and
attack drones. The place resembles a miniature airport — drones take off and
land nonstop.”
Ben-Yishai quoted a military
officer who explained that these devices are doing the work of enforcing the
army’s expulsion orders, and that the army automatically labels as a terrorist
anyone who remains. “A few days ago, we told civilians to evacuate this area,”
the officer said, referring to the Gaza City neighborhoods of Al-Daraj,
Al-Tuffah, and Shuja’iyyah. “Tens of thousands did move toward central Gaza. So
anyone still here can no longer be considered an ‘uninvolved civilian.’”
‘One or two die, and the rest
understand’
On June 13, a few weeks after the
Israeli army had ordered the evacuation of much of Khan Younis, 27-year-old
Mohammed returned to the city with several other young men to check on the
condition of their homes. When they reached the city center, a drone dropped an
explosive on them. “I ran to a wall to protect myself, but some of the young
men were wounded,” he told +972 and Local Call. “It was terrifying.”
Mohammed is one of several
Palestinians from Khan Younis who told +972 and Local Call that the Israeli
army is using armed drones to enforce evacuation orders in the city —
displacing residents and then preventing their return.
The army’s official plans involve
displacing and concentrating Gaza’s 2 million residents in the southern part of
the Strip, first in Al-Mawasi and now on the ruins of Rafah. This aligns with
Israeli political leaders’ explicit intent to implement the so-called “Trump
Plan” and expel Palestinians from Gaza.
Meanwhile, in northern Gaza,
several residents told +972 and Local Call that they were recently forced to
flee their homes after drones began targeting random people in their
neighborhoods. Palestinians in Gaza commonly refer to these drones as “quadcopters”
due to their four propellers.
Reem, a 37-year-old from the
neighborhood of Shuja’iyya in Gaza City, said she decided to flee south after a
drone killed her neighbors. “In March, the army flew quadcopters above us that
broadcast messages ordering us to evacuate,” she recounted. “We saw them drop
explosives on tents to burn them. It terrified me, and I waited until nightfall
to leave my home and evacuate.”
Yousef, 45, described a similar
incident on May 11 when Israeli drones — which he described as “surprisingly
small” — dropped explosives “in different areas of Jabalia to force residents
to flee.” After defying Israel’s evacuation orders for months, this was the
incident that led him to flee his home and move south.
Drones have also been reported to
have targeted residents near humanitarian aid centers. Mahmoud, 37, told +972
and Local Call that when he went from Khan Younis to an aid distribution center
near Rafah on June 23, “a quadcopter dropped a bomb on a group of people.
Dozens were injured, and we ran away.”
The testimonies from soldiers
interviewed for this article line up with previous reporting that the army has
marked certain areas of Gaza as “kill zones,” where any Palestinian who enters
is shot dead. Soldiers told +972 and Local Call that the use of drones has
expanded the size of these kill zones from the range of light firearms to the
range of a drone flight — which can extend up to several kilometers.
“There’s an imaginary line, and
anyone who crosses it dies,” S. explained. “You expect them to understand this
in blood, because there’s no other way — no one marks that line anywhere.” He
said the size of the zone was “a few kilometers,” but that it changed
constantly.
“You send a drone up 200 meters
high, and you can see three to four kilometers in every direction,” said Y.,
another soldier who served in Rafah. “You patrol like that: you see someone
approaching, the first one gets hit with a grenade, and after that, the word
spreads. One or two more come, and they die. The rest understand.”
S. said that drone fire was
directed at people who were walking “suspiciously.” According to him, the
general policy in his battalion was that someone who “walks too fast is
suspicious because he’s fleeing. Someone who walks too slowly is also
suspicious because [it suggests] he knows he’s being watched, so he’s trying to
act normal.”
Soldiers testified that grenades
were also dropped from drones at people who were considered to be “messing with
the ground” — a term the army originally used for militants launching rockets,
but which over time has expanded to incriminate people for something as simple
as bending over.
“That’s the ace: the moment I say
‘messing with the ground,’ I can do anything,” S. explained. “One time, I saw
people picking up clothes. They were walking incredibly slowly, skimming the
edge of the [off-limits] zone, and stepped 20 meters in to collect clothes from
the rubble of a house. You could see that’s what they were doing — and they
were shot.”
“This technology has made killing
much more sterile,” H. said. “It’s like a video game. There’s a crosshair in
the middle of the screen, and you see a video image. You’re hundreds of meters
away, [sometimes] even a kilometer or more. Then you play with the joystick,
see the target, and drop [a grenade]. And it’s even kind of cool. Except this
video game kills people.”
Autel did not respond to +972 and
Local Call’s request for comment. In the past, the company stated that it
“opposes the use of drone products for military uses that violate human
rights,” after the U.S. Congress accused it of supporting Russia’s invasion of
Ukraine and helping China suppress Uyghurs and other minorities.
The Israeli army declined to
comment.
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