The Hezbollah party said on Friday that it has handed over two suspected Israeli drones to the Lebanese army, Hezbollah’s al-Manar news channel and Lebanese military sources said.
The two drones went down in the party’s stronghold in Beirut’s southern suburbs on Sunday.
The army and Hezbollah said one exploded and one crashed, causing damage to Hezbollah’s media center.
A security official in the region has described the target of the drone strikes as linked to precision-guided missile projects.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday accused Iran and Hezbollah of racing to build a missile-production program in Lebanon, vowing to destroy the ambitious project and issuing a stern warning to his enemies to "be careful."
"Today we uncovered part of Iran and Hezbollah's precision missile project. We know a few other things," he said at a news conference.
"We are determined to eliminate this dangerous project. The aim of the publication today is to convey a message that we will not sit by and allow our enemies to arm themselves with deadly weapons directed at us," he said.
Hezbollah denies harboring missile factories. While the party’s leader boasts about having highly accurate missiles, he denies that the group produces them.
Israel and Hezbollah battled to a stalemate in a monthlong war in 2006.
Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, a military spokesman, said in the years after the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in 2011, the army was successful in thwarting attempts by Iran to smuggle guided missiles to Hezbollah through Syria, and a later effort to convert existing Hezbollah rockets into guided missiles.
More recently, he said Israel has identified efforts by Iran and Hezbollah to establish a missile-production industry inside Lebanon.
He said Iran "has not only relinquished" its efforts. "They have intensified them," he said. He described "more efforts, more money, more operatives and more pressure from Iran."
"Iran is endangering Lebanon," Conricus said. He accused Iran of using Lebanese civilians as "human shields."
