View from London: Israel’s air defences buckle under powerful new Iranian missile barrage

Photo: Tasnim News

Scenes of devastation on the streets of Tel Aviv have prompted alarm over what some believed to be the impenetrable layers of protection over Israel, including the Iron Dome, writes ‘The Telegraph’.

At least 13 people, all identified as civilians, have been killed since Tehran started its long-range barrages late on Friday.

Missiles killed four people, all women and children, in northern Israel between Saturday night and Sunday morning, according to the local police force.

Another four were killed and dozens more wounded when a multi-storey building was hit in Bat Yam, just south of Tel Aviv.

Pictures of the search and rescue efforts revealed the extent of the damage, with the one side of the building almost entirely shaved off as a result of the strike.

Scenes of hulking piles of concrete debris and protruding rebar steel have been compared to Gaza.

Footage circulated during Friday night’s Iranian barrage showed missiles landing in and around the Kirya compound, which belongs to the Israeli ministry of defence and is know as Israel’s Pentagon, in Tel Aviv.

Another target hit early on Sunday morning was confirmed as the Weizmann Institute, a civilian research and science centre in Rehovot, near Tel Aviv.

This strike blurred the lines between the civilian and military worlds. While the Weizmann is considered an academic facility, its researchers have often contributed to Israel;s military developments.

Similar strikes happened in the port city of Haifa, home to Israel’s largest oil refinery.

Just short of 10 per cent of the hundreds of missiles fired by Iran have evaded Israel’s complex web of air-defences.

Israel’s military, in order not to offer any information that could aid Tehran in future attacks, has given no official comment on the number of missiles that got through.

However, the Iranian air strikes demonstrate the difficulty even one of the world’s best air defence systems has when it comes to ballistic missiles.

Ballistic missiles can fly at hypersonic speeds above Mach-5, meaning very few surface-to-air batteries are capable of intercepting them.

Israel’s “David’s Sling” – named after the Biblical story of David and Goliath – is one of them. But with barrages of dozens of missiles at a time, even this system has difficulty keeping up.

How Israel’s ‘Iron Dome’ defence system works

The larger the number of missiles, the more chance there is of at least one sneaking through and finding its target.

While Israel is only a small country, it is likely that its armed forces concentrate its defences on military targets, rather than civilian areas.

Before it started bombarding Israel, Iran was believed to have as many as 2,000 missiles capable of hitting the Jewish state in its arsenal.

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