Calling her “the most charismatic, formidable, and ambitious female political leader to have emerged in Israel (or anywhere else, for that matter) for a long time,” Daniel Johnson examines the Israeli justice minister’s rapid rise to prominence and her ideas for strengthening Israel’s institutions:

In just over a year, [Shaked] has dominated the headlines on several different issues. Most controversially, she has challenged the supreme court, accusing it of usurping the powers of executive and legislature. The court, a bastion of the Israeli liberal establishment, has reined in successive governments of the right. But when the court recently blocked [Benjamin] Netanyahu’s plan to push through the Leviathan offshore gas project—on which the prime minister has staked his reputation—it fell to Shaked to respond. In her view, the court, influenced by the doctrines of its former chief justice Aharon Barak, has cultivated not judicial independence but judicial activism, and she insists that Israel’s constitutional balance now needs to be redressed. . . .

Shaked has provoked the international community, too. She wants to force NGOs that receive most of their funds from “foreign government entities” to be identified as such. . . . She also wants to reintroduce a law defining Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, opposition to which brought down the last coalition. Most controversially, she wants Israel to abandon the two-state solution, annex the borderlands of the West Bank (“Area C”), which are home to 400,000 Jewish settlers, and offer Israeli citizenship to the 90,000 Palestinians there. Eventually, she envisages a confederation between the remaining Palestinian territories and Jordan. Both Jews and Palestinians would finally obtain security, prosperity, and peace.

On Tuesday, a Hizballah drone attack injured three people in northern Israel. The next day, another attack, targeting an IDF base, injured eighteen people, six of them seriously, in Arab al-Amshe, also in the north. This second attack involved the simultaneous use of drones carrying explosives and guided antitank missiles. In both cases, the defensive systems that performed so successfully last weekend failed to stop the drones and missiles. Ron Ben-Yishai has a straightforward explanation as to why: the Lebanon-backed terrorist group is getting better at evading Israel defenses. He explains the three basis systems used to pilot these unmanned aircraft, and their practical effects:

These systems allow drones to act similarly to fighter jets, using “dead zones”—areas not visible to radar or other optical detection—to approach targets. They fly low initially, then ascend just before crashing and detonating on the target. The terrain of southern Lebanon is particularly conducive to such attacks.

But this requires skills that the terror group has honed over months of fighting against Israel. The latest attacks involved a large drone capable of carrying over 50 kg (110 lbs.) of explosives. The terrorists have likely analyzed Israel’s alert and interception systems, recognizing that shooting down their drones requires early detection to allow sufficient time for launching interceptors.

The IDF tries to detect any incoming drones on its radar, as it had done prior to the war. Despite Hizballah’s learning curve, the IDF’s technological edge offers an advantage. However, the military must recognize that any measure it takes is quickly observed and analyzed, and even the most effective defenses can be incomplete. The terrain near the Lebanon-Israel border continues to pose a challenge, necessitating technological solutions and significant financial investment.