Israel enforcing Gaza evacuations with grenade-dropping drones

‘It’s like a video game. There’s a crosshair in the middle of the screen, and you see someone…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 on them…It’s kind of cool, except with this video game you actually get to kill people.’

972 Mag

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 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 — to force them to leave their homes and prevent them from returning.

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 grenade-dropping 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 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 did not pose 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 means there’s a dead body to eat’.

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 someone 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 ‘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, there is strong evidence that the drone was an Autel model.

‘It resembles a miniature airport’

According to soldiers who spoke to +972, 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.

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 the other young men were not so lucky’ he told +972. ‘It was terrifying.’

Mohammed is one of several Palestinians from Khan Younis who told +972 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 expel Palestinians from Gaza.

Meanwhile, in northern Gaza, several residents told +972 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 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 horribly 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 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 kind of cool, except with this video game you get to kill people.’

Although detailed questions were sent to the IDF Spokesperson, they initially declined to answer them. After publication, a response was sent that does not specifically address the allegations in the article and states: ‘The IDF categorically rejects the allegations that it is acting intentionally to harm uninvolved people. Army orders explicitly prohibit shooting at uninvolved people. The IDF is committed to international law and allegations of violation of the law and orders will be thoroughly examined by the authorized mechanisms in the IDF.’