São Paulo, SP (UOL/Folhapress) – In the last days. As part of its offensive strategy, Iran has launched missiles directed to Israeli territory, which tries to combat them with an anti-meal defense system known as iron dome.
Missiles are piercing the iron dome. Although the iron dome slaughtered part of the missiles, several Iranian projectiles managed to penetrate the defense system. One of the offensive on Sunday, for example, hit residential buildings on the coastal plain and northern Israel. Another attack has reached supply stations for Israeli fighters.
Merging different attacking fronts, Iran causes overload on Israel’s air defense systems. In this scenario, the Israeli forces have a “small window” to detect, evaluate and respond to imminent threats, told Long War Journal analyst to The New York Times. By directing a large amount of shots, Iran expects at least some of these projectiles to pass the Israeli defense system.
Iran has a wide range of options to attack Israel through the sky. Heavy ballistic missiles, for example, fly at speeds often higher than the sound and can, within minutes, leave the Iranian territory and reach Israel. Cruise and drone missiles are also part of the artifacts released by Iran, flying low and being difficult to detect.
“What Iran tries to do by attacking Israel is to launch all these things [os diferentes tipos de mísseis e drones] at once. Thus, they would have things flying at different levels, different trajectories and at different speeds, which aims to saturate Israel’s radar system, which has to choose whether or not to make them down, ”says AFSHON OSTOVAR, a professor at the Naval Graduate School (USA), in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.
Israel would be exhausting inventory of interceptors
Iron dome has radars that identify threats almost instantly. After identifying a missile, the system estimates the fall site and defines whether the rocket will be intercepted or not: if the system evaluates that the enemy rocket will fall into a populated region, the iron dome launches at least two missiles to intercept it.
Arsenal of interceptors available to the Israeli Armed Forces has been a source of speculation since last year. In October, about 30 Iranian ballistic missiles fell “unharmed” near a military base in southern Israel. In May this year, a missile launched by Yemen’s Humuthi extremist group escaped Israeli air defense systems and fell near Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv.
Demand for interceptors is larger than volume in Israeli stock. Tom Karako, an antimysis defense expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, explained to The New York Times that the Israeli government could take “years” to produce enough missile interceptors for their war conflicts. With the frequent use of these interceptors since the beginning of the conflict with the Hamas group in October 2023, Israel is “exhausting” his stock of this type of weaponry, Karako said.
