A bloody conflict between Israel and Iran entered its sixth day on Wednesday, as both countries exchanged heavy air strikes.
The conflict began with Israeli strikes on nuclear sites in Iran and on its capital of Tehran on Friday. Israel says Iran is secretly developing a nuclear weapon, something which Tehran has consistently denied.
At least 224 people have been killed in Iran and 24 people killed in Israel since the conflict erupted last week, according to authorities in both countries. Iran has not been regularly updating its death toll, and Washington-based group Human Rights Activists says at least 585 people have been killed as of Wednesday.
Follow the latest updates on the conflict between Israel and Iran here.
The Iron Dome is a surface-to-air missile system which tracks and intercepts projectiles headed towards populated areas in Israel. Its success at repelling attacks in the recent past has meant Israelis are not used to seeing rockets successfully strike their major cities.
Israeli officials have long accepted that the Iron Dome is not 100 per cent effective. Here The Independent looks at why Iran’s attacks have breached Israel’s strong defences.
Iron Dome ‘effective but not invincible’
Dr Marion Messmer, a senior research fellow of security studies at Chatham House, says that the Iron Dome may not be as effective as many believe.
“A lot of the time, the Iron Dome has better PR than is actually warranted,” she told The Independent.
“At the end of the day, it’s an air defence system. It’s a very effective air defence system. But no air defence is completely unbreachable.”
Given the scale and scope of Iran’s strikes on Israel – which have been more sustained than attacks in recent years – Dr Messmer said it is not a surprise that some of the missiles and drones were able to get through.
“Part of the Iranian strategy is essentially to fire a lot, and therefore to hope that the interceptors won’t be able to shoot everything down, which is one of the things that we’ve seen.”
Iran’s missiles pose new type of challenge
Experts believe that Iran may have also used hypersonic glide vehicles (HGVs), which can manoeuvre and glide at hypersonic speed, making them a lot harder to intercept.
“If you’ve got something that can manoeuvre, then obviously you can either pre-program an erratic flight path, or you can change it if you see that interceptors have been launched. That then makes it much easier to avoid any interception,” Dr Messmer explained.
Dr Messmer maintains that the Iron Dome’s defence rates are still “incredibly impressive”, but added a caveat: many of the rockets previously shot down by the system come in smaller numbers with predictable flight paths and from predictable sites. These have mostly been fired by Hamas militants in Gaza.
“No air defence system is unbreachable,” agrees Dr Marina Miron, a postdoctoral researcher in King’s College London’s War Studies department.
Volume of missiles ‘leaving Iron Dome overwhelmed’
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards on Monday said they had employed a new method that caused Israel’s multi-layered defence systems to target each other and allowed Iran to successfully hit many targets.
Dr Miron speculated that this may have been done by positioning decoy drones near Israeli defence missiles, in such a way that it would cause another Israeli missile to wipe it out.
But the main cause of the most significant breach to the Iron Dome in years, she said, is the sheer “overload” of Iranian missiles which left the Iron Dome system “overwhelmed”.
The rare aspect of the last five days is the sheer number of missiles sent by Iran, she added, rather than the Iron Dome unexpectedly faltering.
Iran would have sent a number of decoys, causing Iron Dome missiles to be wasted on what is in effect scrap metal, Dr Miron added.
Electronic warfare also could have been used, Dr Miron added. “Suppressing the radar is another option – the missile will have a component which allows it to fly invisible.”
