The weapons that really saved Israel this week are its Arrow 2 and Arrow 3 anti-ballistic missile systems . The Arrows are the crown jewels of Israel’s Aerial Defence Array, a multi-layered air defence system. They can shoot down missiles in space.
The point is Tuesday’s attack could have easily filled Israel’s morgues if its air defences hadn’t worked.
It was nothing short of a miracle only one person died when he was crushed by falling debris in the occupied West Bank.
Spy satellites spotted Iran’s missile forces fuelling their missiles and intercepted orders to prepare the weapons for launch. Just 90 minutes later Israel warned its citizens to shelter. And minutes after that the skies over Israel erupted with explosions. Matthew Savill, the military science director of the London-based Rusi think tank, said most of the Iranian Hyperspnic missiles appeared to be Emad and Ghadr-1 medium-range ballistic missiles, which are variants of the Shahab-A barrage of 182 ballistic missiles took as little as 12 minutes to get to Israel. Hypersonic missiles can manoeuvre at five times the speed of sound making them far harder to intercept. The Shahab-A barrage of 182 ballistic missiles are around 16 metres long, weigh around 19 tonnes and have a range of up to 2,000km. They are designed to blast to the edge of space before re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere, breaking into smaller parts and plummeting towards their targets at many times the speed of sound. Iran also claimed it fired much newer “hypersonic” Fattah 1 missiles. Hypersonic missiles can manoeuvre at five times the speed of sound making them far harder to intercept. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard claimed the Fattah 1s were aimed at Israel’s air defences. Specifically, at the Arrow-2 and Arrow-3 sites. The launches were detected immediately by infra red satellites and long range radar systems. That data was fed directly to the air defense command and control points — AI powered brains — which make split-second calculations about the missiles’ trajectories and most likely targets. Israel’s AI powered air defense systems decided instantly which interceptors to fire at which missiles after ranking the targets in terms of priority. Tuesday’s targets appeared to include the headquarters of Israel’s Mossad spy service in Glilot, Tel Aviv, and two major airbases, Tel Nof and Nevatim. Iran tried to overwhelm the Arrow system by “saturating” it with missiles. Israel said the attack was “ineffective”. Videos captured “multiple impacts” especially at Nevatim airbase doing little damage. A small number of the intercepts were made at the last second, in the so-called “terminal phase”.
The question now is how Israel responds.
The spiral of slaughter seems destined to continue. Ambassador Hotovely vowed “action”.
She said: “Iran will pay the price . . . There will be a severe retaliation coming from Israel.”
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