In northern Israel, IDF conducts offensive operations into Lebanon territory, where fierce battles occur with Hezbollah militants, who have FPV drones in their arsenal, evidently supplied by iran, which in turn received this technology from russia.
Hezbollah actively uses these FPV drones for strikes on Israeli armored vehicles. On published video from Hezbollah FPV drone cameras, one can see drone hitting Merkava 4 tanks equipped with Rafael-manufactured Trophy active protection systems.
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Moreover, drone approaches target at quite working angles for Trophy, effectively under ideal interception conditions. In some videos, FPV drone hits almost Trophy launcher itself. However, system does not even attempt to intercept drone, despite footage clearly showing it is loaded with countermunitions.
Worth recalling here that Rafael company back in 2024 announced Trophy APS capability to intercept strike unmanned systems. Overall Rafael speaks about 90% overall effectiveness against all threat types for their system.
However, as we can see, in real combat Trophy appeared absolutely helpless against FPV drones. However, should note we do not know all conditions under which FPV drone attacks were conducted. Quite possibly system was simply disabled, as judging from footage, tanks at strike moment could be standing even without crew.
Also should emphasize that despite Rafael inserting footage with FPV drones and their tank strikes in their promotional video, capability to counter them was never directly announced. Moreover, in Trophy testing footage, it intercepted only aircraft-type unmanned systems.
In other words, summarizing, two variants exist: first, that Trophy does work against FPV drones but at strike moment system was simply disabled; and second variant, that system is not capable of intercepting such targets in real combat conditions.
Speaking about active protection systems and their FPV drone interception capability, worth recalling another Israeli APS Iron Fist. For it unlike Trophy, capability to intercept such targets is officially announced, and they even showed testing video where it shoots down FPV drone.
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