One evening, at his home in Jerusalem, David Zini heard bursts of gunfire coming from a nearby Arab neighborhood of Sur Baher.
“It was something on a company-to-battalion scale,” he later told his staff. “I thought about calling the head of the Shin Bet, [Israel’s internal security service], but then I remembered that it’s me.”
As if the organization didn’t have enough on its plate with the war against Hamas, “mowing the lawn” in Judea and Samaria, securing the prime minister and the state’s top leadership, and defending democracy and the elections, two new threats have emerged. Their true significance has yet to be fully internalized by most security practitioners: drones and weapons smuggling.
Five years ago, only technological-military powers—Israel being one of them—could track a figure from afar, hover in the air above, and drop explosives on their heads. Today, 14-year-olds can do it. The street price for a fragmentation grenade is about $150; for a drone, it’s $300.