How the Gaza War fast-tracked the development of Israel’s national drone initiative

In 2019, the Israeli government launched the Israel National Drone Initiative (INDI) to promote the safe, fair, and economically viable use of drones in both the government and commercial sectors.

Set up as a cooperation between government institutions and private companies, the initiative focuses on probing and testing the use of drones across Israeli airspace, with the hope of solving several problems: alleviating traffic congestion on busy routes, providing more efficient means of certain delivery services, and create a global competitive advantage for Israeli high-tech companies.

The first phase of the initiative, between 2019 and 2022, focused on small cargo flights in several municipalities.

The second phase had the goal of increasing payload capacity and delivery range to prepare for a future that could potentially involve human transportation for commercial or medical reasons.

The INDI also aims to address regulation of airspace through the creation of regulatory infrastructure for autonomous flying vehicles for public benefit.

As part of the initiative, both public and private entities, including the Israel Defense Force (IDF), particularly the Israel Air Force (IAF), the Israel Airports Authority (IAA), and several municipalities, along with a group of private companies, cooperated to build a central network for managing air traffic for up to thousands of commercial drones, while also respecting the military’s need for restricted air space or vehicle control frequencies.

The initiative had been progressing and expanding steadily since its inception in 2019, however, the outbreak of the Gaza War forced the project to mature rapidly.

Daniella Partem, who leads the INDI as head of the Israel Innovation Authority’s Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, told the Times of Israel that the war “brought our experiments to the real world very quickly.”

The beginning of the war saw the IDF enforce a ban on almost all commercial drone traffic, which was understandable considering the use of small consumer drones in carrying out the Oct. 7 attacks.

“One of the major challenges of creating a civilian drone infrastructure is perfecting a model for how the defense world and the civilian world can live together in the skies without interfering with each other,” Partem said. “Once the war started, it put this tension on steroids.”

The Initiative was tasked with assisting the remaining commercial drone operators permitted to fly by helping them understand the newly designated flight zones and altitude restrictions, ensuring compliance with those limits.

To achieve this, the INDI needed to develop a system to register and track drone use throughout Israeli airspace.

“We needed to develop a system to quickly register new drones on the network and coordinate them with the army network. This required a combination of technology, regulation, and the ability to act rapidly,” Partem said. “This was only possible because we had already developed the infrastructure and created a relationship of cooperation and trust with the regulator.”

Shlomi Kofman, vice president and head of the Israel Innovation Authority's International Collaborations Division, said that the initiative has led to Israel being recognized as a leader in creating a drone network infrastructure.

“The procedures and templates for legislation that we are developing are being studied and copied around the world,” Kofman said.

The Israel Innovation Authority said it hopes the model it has developed “can benefit other countries seeking to discover innovative solutions in the aviation industry.”