Drones used in drug smuggling between Gaza and Israel despite war

Israeli security authorities prevented a drug-smuggling attempt across the border between Gaza and Israel, the Israel Police and Israeli military reported on Saturday.

While smuggling activities in the region have existed for years, the latest incident indicates that the smugglers are undeterred by the ongoing war between Israel and the Hamas terrorist organization.

The smuggler reportedly an Israeli Bedouin, used a drone to transport drugs from Israel into the Gaza Strip. Israeli forces also discovered an additional drone containing drugs inside the individual’s vehicle. The suspect will be further investigated by the regional central unit of the police.

While the latest smuggling attempt was prevented, Israeli authorities stress that the incident is part of a larger recent trend. Approximately 10 border smuggling operations were reportedly successful that same week.

The ongoing war has, nevertheless, affected drug smuggling activities along the Gaza-Israel border. Previously, drugs were often transported using trucks disguised as carriers of humanitarian aid to Gaza.

In addition to drugs, Israeli authorities believe that last week’s large smuggling operation included cigarettes, which have reportedly become scarce and a valuable commodity in the Gaza Strip.

In November 2024, Georgios Petropoulos, head of the Gaza sub-office of the UN Coordinator for Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), revealed that cigarettes are being transported using various methods, including being concealed in cans of food.

“Recently, we’ve found cigarettes hidden inside cans and other food products. This suggests the smuggling process starts during packaging, likely in Egypt,” Petropoulos said.

While smugglers on both sides of the border are mainly driven by the prospect of attractive profits, there is also a darker side to the activities in the Gaza area.

Before the Oct. 7 war, Hamas systematically used border tunnels to transport large quantities of weapons from the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula into the Gaza Strip. During the past 15 months of war, the Israeli military has invested considerable effort in blocking Hamas’ efforts to smuggle new supplies of weapons through tunnels.

In September 2024, the IDF estimated it had dismantled some 80% of Hamas’s border tunnels below the Philadelphi Corridor, a strategically important narrow strip of land on the border between Gaza and Egypt.

“The divisional engineering forces and the Yahalom [combat engineering commando unit] continue to locate and destroy underground routes and terrorist infrastructures in the area,” the Israeli military stated.

The Iranian regime has played a central role in smuggling weapons to its terror proxies across the Middle East. In December, the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center published a report detailing Iran’s weapons smuggling operations, which was based on secret documents that Israeli forces had retrieved from Hamas in Gaza.

The documents revealed that the Iranian regime has invested significant resources in smuggling weapons to its proxies in Lebanon, Gaza, Syria and the West Bank.