Harop

Harop is a long-endurance loitering munition built by Israel Aerospace Industries and fielded since 2009. It is the larger, more sophisticated successor to the company’s Harpy — a 1990s anti-radar drone — and was designed to give operators the option to hunt emitters or visually identified targets, and to abort an attack run partway through. With a quoted range of around 1,000 kilometres and roughly nine hours of endurance, Harop straddles the line between a reusable surveillance aircraft and a single-shot cruise missile.

The airframe is a delta-winged, propeller-driven vehicle carrying a 23-kilogram warhead. It launches from a sealed canister, typically mounted on a truck or naval vessel, and is piloted from a ground control station. Two attack modes define the system. In anti-radiation mode, an onboard seeker homes on hostile radar emissions in much the same way as a HARM missile, and the aircraft can wait above a defended area for a radar to switch on. In electro-optical mode, the operator uses a stabilised colour and thermal sensor to identify and prosecute targets manually. Crucially the run-in is reversible: an operator can pull the aircraft up at the last moment, return it to the loiter pattern, and re-engage. That man-in-the-loop step is what its makers point to when distinguishing Harop from fully autonomous loitering munitions.

Azerbaijan’s use of Harop during the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war made the system internationally visible. Footage released by Baku showed strikes on Armenian S-300, Osa and 9K33 air-defence vehicles, as well as on troop concentrations, and the campaign is widely credited with collapsing Armenian air-defence cover in the early days of the conflict. Israel itself is reported to have used Harop against a Syrian Pantsir-S1 battery in 2018. India is among the larger export customers, having bought a batch in the late 2000s and reportedly deployed the type during the 2025 confrontation with Pakistan. Germany has fielded a quantity for evaluation, and Morocco signed a multi-year contract reported in regional press at several hundred million dollars.

Development has continued under IAI’s MBT Missiles Division. The company markets naval-launched and lighter variants, and the related Harpy NG and Mini Harpy fill out a family of loitering munitions sized from man-portable to long-range. Harop has nonetheless remained the firm’s flagship in the category and a regular fixture at Aero India and Singapore Airshow demonstrations.

Within the loitering-munition market Harop sits at the heavy, long-endurance end. Its combat record — particularly the Nagorno-Karabakh footage — is among the most-studied datasets for armed forces evaluating attritable strike against integrated air defences.