A drone from Lebanon struck a building near the private residence of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel on Saturday, his office said, highlighting the continuing challenge posed to Israel’s air defence by unmanned vehicles.

Netanyahu and his wife were not home at the time of the strike, according to the Prime Minister’s office, which said that there had been no injuries.

The episode came nearly a week after a Hezbollah drone attack killed four people and wounded dozens of others at a military base in northern Israel.

The military said it had intercepted two additional drones launched on Saturday, which set off air-raid sirens at a military base in Glilot, just north of Tel Aviv. But that did not trigger sirens in Caesarea, the coastal location of Netanyahu’s home. The military said the incident was “under review”.

Israel possesses some of the most advanced and effective air defence technology in the world, a multilayered system that has intercepted nearly all of the thousands of drones, missiles and rockets fired at it over the past year by Iran and its regional proxy forces, including Hezbollah in Lebanon.

But drones — which are cheaper for its adversaries to acquire and operate — have occasionally evaded Israel’s air defences. Experts say they pose a particular challenge for Israel because they emit less heat, often contain less metal and fly at lower altitudes and slower speeds than the rockets and missiles its air defences are primarily designed to thwart.

On Saturday, as the Israeli military tried to determine how one drone had evaded the system in Caesarea, it said that dozens of other “projectiles” had entered Israel from Lebanon. Most of them were either intercepted or allowed to fall into unpopulated areas, but one man was killed and another injured during a rocket barrage fired toward the city of Acre, according to Magen David Adom, Israel’s emergency service.

Israel’s vulnerability to drones was also illustrated in June, when Hezbollah broadcast footage of sensitive installations in Haifa, Israel’s third-largest city, that it captured from a drone that hovered over the northern city seemingly without being detected.

New York Times News Service