The Israelis faced a sophisticated attack from Iran
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant in Israel after the Oct. 7 Israel-Hamas Attack: Follow-up of a High-Definition War
Over 30,000 Palestinians died in the six months since October as a result of Israeli bombardment and ground invasion, according to Palestinian health officials.
The strike and retaliation represent an escalation that many officials worldwide had expressed worry about ever since the outbreak of war between Israel and the Gaza-based militant group Hamas on Oct. 7, the day Hamas led an attack on Israel that left some 1,200 people dead.
President Biden decided to cut short his trip to Delaware so he could return to the White House on Saturday. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel. And Iran will not succeed,” Biden said Friday.
“Iran is a terrorist state — the world is seeing this now more than ever,” Israel’s defense minister Yoav Gallant said Saturday, hours before the launch. We know how to respond to terrorism and we are determined to defend our citizens.
By Saturday, as anticipation had grown over a possible retaliation, Israeli officials warned residents living in communities near Gaza and the Lebanon border to limit the size of gatherings and to work indoors or within reach of a shelter. Schools across Israel were closed through Monday.
Iranian officials said the attack was payback for the airstrike that hit the Iranian consulate in Damascus. Seven Iranian military officials, including two generals, were killed.
The White House confirmed that the launch happened and that President Biden would monitor the attack from the Situation Room.
Israel’s Nuclear Forces and Relativistic Drone Systems: Israeli Response to Islamic Warfare and Israeli Defenses in the Middle East
“We have determined a clear principle: Whoever harms us, we will harm them. Netanyahu said that they would defend themselves against any threat with determination.
In a Saturday night speech to the Israelis, Benjamin Netanyahu said that his country was ready for both defensive and offensive scenarios.
In a statement broadcast on Iranian state television, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said it had launched dozens of drones and missiles against targets in Israel.
Israeli military spokesman Daniel Hagari said the drones would take hours to arrive in Israeli airspace. He told Israelis to stay in safe rooms for 10 minutes if sirens went off.
And Jeffrey Lewis, a member of the International Security Advisory Board at the U.S. State Department, said in a post on X that Iran was using land-attack cruise missiles that could carry around a ton of explosives.
Iran has mostly focused on deterrence, long range missiles, drones and air defenses. It has one of the largest ballistic missile and drone arsenals across the Middle East, according to weapons experts, and is also becoming a major arms exporter globally.
Previously, Israel had faced aerial attacks from Hamas and Islamic Jihad, whose rocket arsenal includes short-range (12 to 25 miles) and somewhat inaccurate 122-milimeter rockets of the Grad family, as well as Syrian-made M-302 rockets with a range of about 100 miles. The range of Fajr-5 rockets from Iran and the locally made version is around 50 miles.
His post states that different versions of that missile were supplied to the Houthis in Yemen and to the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces.
“Iran attacked Israel, escalating an already volatile conflict. Here’s what to know,” Israel’s intelligence agency director Efraim Halevy said
“The question is whether Israel is going to retaliate immediately, or surprise the Iranians in one way or another,” said Efraim Halevy, who served as director of Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, during the latter part of Mr. Netanyahu’s first term in the 1990s.
Governments in the Middle East, including Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, also issued statements expressing concern and calling for restraint so as not to exacerbate tensions in the region.
The Secretary-General of the UN was alarmed by the danger of a devastating region-wide escalation when he spoke on Saturday.
The leaders said in the statement that they stood in solidarity with Israel and that they were against Iran destabilizing the region. The G7 is made up of the United States, Canada, Italy, Britain, France, Germany, Japan and the European Union.
Republicans also aim to include language that “holds Iran and its terrorist proxies accountable,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise announced in a statement released Saturday night.
In Congress, House Republicans are making changes to their legislative schedule for this week to consider a yet-to-be-revealed proposal that would further support Israel.
Nearly all of the weapons were intercepted by Israel and its allies, including the United States. However, a few of the Iranian ballistic missiles made it through the defenses, severely injuring a 7-year-old girl and slightly damaging a military base in southern Israel, according to Israeli officials.
Iranian state media said on Sunday that Iran’s “operation” against Israel had ended and there wouldn’t be any more attacks.
In the days leading up to the attack, the U.S. and Israel closely coordinated their air defense preparations. The Iranian bombardment was described as being at the high end by the U.S. official.
The main protection against Iran’s missiles was provided by the Arrow 3. The Arrow 3 has been around for several years, but had never faced such an intense onslaught.
Israeli ambassador to the U.N. Gilad Erdan: Israel’s response to the Hamas attack on Oct. 7 in Damascus
The Times of Israel and Haaretz reported that a 7-year old Bedouin girl had surgery for a head wound after the attack. Hagari was able to confirm the reports.
Iran’s foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, said the country notified the U.S. ahead of the attack through Swiss intermediaries, informing that the strike will not target American personnel or bases in the region. There was no notification from Iran before an attack on where the weapons would be used.
Israel claimed on Sunday that its fighter jets struck a site in southern Lebanon that belonged to Hezbollah.
Israel and Hezbollah have been exchanging fire across the border with Lebanon regularly since the surprise Oct. 7 attack by Hamas and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza. Iran has long supplied Hamas with funds and weapons but the White House has not directly linked Iran to the Oct. 7 attack.
At the meeting, Israeli ambassador to the U.N. Gilad Erdan called for the U.N. to “impose all possible sanctions on Iran before it’s too late.” He said that Israel had the right to retaliate because the attack crossed every red line.
Israel’s war cabinet also gathered to discuss how to respond to the Iranian attacks. The Israeli leadership has not said what it is going to do.
At home, he is an unpopular leader whom many hold responsible for his government’s policy and intelligence failures that led to the deadly Hamas-led attack in southern Israel on Oct. 7, which prompted Israel to go to war in Gaza. Abroad, he is the focus of international censure over Israel’s prosecution of that war, which has resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Gazans.
Iran launched a missile attack on Sunday in response to the Israeli air attack that killed several Iranian commanders in Damascus.
“Bibi has been playing a long game with the world”: Israeli political commentator and author of a biography of the Israeli leader Mualem
“Like everything in Israel in recent years, the story is split into two narratives,” said Mazal Mualem, an Israeli political commentator for Al-Monitor, a Middle East news site, and the author of a recent biography of the Israeli leader.
Ms. Mualem said “Bibi is still in the game”, referring to him by his nickname. “He’s a central player, and it isn’t over, diplomatically or politically. And he plays a long game.”
But it was also under Mr. Netanyahu’s watch that Israel forged diplomatic relations with more Arab states that are considered part of the moderate, anti-Iranian axis, including the United Arab Emirates.
Sometimes resorting to gimmicks and antics to draw attention to Iran’s nuclear progress, Mr. Netanyahu has in the past made opposing Iran a key part of his global diplomacy. The UN General Assembly had a cartoon bomb with red lines depicting enrichment levels that was held up once by him. He displayed a piece of what he claimed was an Iranian drone that was shot down in Israel, at the Security Conference again.
For long, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs point man coordinating diplomatic efforts to counter the Iranian threat was talking about it everywhere he went.
He further challenged Mr. Obama in 2015 with an impassioned speech to a joint meeting of Congress denouncing what he called a “bad deal” being negotiated by the United States and other world powers with Iran to curb its nuclear program.
When President Donald J. Trump came to power, Mr. Netanyahu encouraged him to withdraw from the agreement — a move that many Israeli experts have called a dire mistake and a failure of Mr. Netanyahu’s Iran policy.
On the Impossibility of UAV Missile-Defence at the Iron Dome, as witnessed by Hamas and the United States
Some of that work has fallen to the US military, which has confirmed that it has shot down an unspecified number of Iranian drones and will continue to do so. The UK has said it will provide backup for US planes that have been diverted from their existing missions, and that it will intercept UAVs as well.
“Because there’s so much indication of warning in advance of the UAS, presumably there’s going to be a lot of fixed-wing, manned aircraft that are looking at these things, tracking these things, and presumably trying to engage these things,” says Tom Karako, director of the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a policy think tank.
That slowness and fixed flight path in particular mean the unmanned aerial systems (UAS) have to travel for several hours before they reach their intended destination, leaving ample opportunities to intercept them.
“At one level they’re not difficult to take down. They’re not stealthy, they don’t fly very fast, and they don’t maneuver,” says David Ochmanek, senior defense analyst at the nonprofit RAND Corporation. “In some way they’re like airborne targets.”
Things get more complicated if the drones are flying so low that the radar can’t detect them. It may be the sheer amount that poses the biggest challenge. It is possible that the Iron Dome can get overwhelmed, as it did on October 7 when Hamas fired thousands of missiles at Israel.
Iain and his associates at the Center for National Security Initiatives at the University of Colorado believe all of that process was designed to protect against missiles. It is well- prepared for an onslaught of drones. A drone is likely to fly slower than rockets, so it is an easier threat to address.
There are at least 10 missile-defense batteries strategically distributed around the country in the Iron Dome. When radar detects incoming objects, it sends that information back to a command-and-control center, which will track the threat to assess whether it’s a false alarm, and where it might hit if it’s not. The system fires missile at the incoming rockets that are most likely to hit a populated area.
