Israeli Security Council Action Plan for the Attack of Oct. 7 on Israel and Iran’s Retaliation on an Israeli Consulate in Damascus
In the six months since Oct. 7, Israel has bombarded Gaza and conducted a devastating ground invasion that has left much of the territory in ruins and more than 33,000 Palestinians dead, 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.
In the event of an attack, President Biden decided to cut short his trip to Delaware and return to the White House 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.
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said that Iran is a terrorist state on the eve of the launch. “We are determined to defend our citizens against this terrorism, and we know how to respond to it.”
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.
The launch comes four days after Iran’s leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei vowed retaliation for an April 1 strike on an Iranian consulate in the Syrian capital of Damascus. Iran said the strike had killed seven members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, including two generals, and it blamed Israel for the attack.
The launch was confirmed by the White House, as well as the fact that the president would monitor it from the Situation Room.
Israel’s missile arsenal in the light of Hamas’s attack on the Gaza Strip, as revealed by the Israeli High-Energy Observatory
“We have determined a clear principle: Whoever harms us, we will harm them. We will defend ourselves against threats with determination and with level-headedness.
Benjamin Netanyahu spoke to the Israelis on Saturday night and said that Israel was ready for any contingency, both defensively and offensive.
US officials have said that so far Iran has launched a total of 150 missiles at Israel. The Iron Dome has been active in stopping them so far, but a boy was injured from an intercept missile.
The drones would take hours to arrive in Israeli airspace, Israeli military spokesman Daniel Hagari said. He warned Israelis to stay in safe rooms for 10 minutes if sirens in their areas go off.
Jeffrey Lewis said in a post on X that Iran had launched land-attack cruise missiles, which could carry around a ton of explosives.
In recent decades, Iran has largely been 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.
Last year, after the attack by Hamas in October, Israel asked the United States for more precision-guided munitions for its combat aircraft and more interceptors for its Iron Dome missile defense system. Israel’s weapons arsenal includes Vietnam-era missiles, some of which have a failure rate as high as 15 percent.
In addition, different versions of the missile have been provided to the Houthis and the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq.
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. They’re kind of like airborne targets.
Things get more complicated if the drones are flying so low that the radar can’t detect them. The biggest challenge, though, may be sheer quantity. Israel has hundreds of interceptor missiles at its disposal, but it’s still possible for the Iron Dome to get overwhelmed, as it did on October 7 when Hamas attacked Israel with a barrage of thousands of missiles.
“All of that process was designed for defense against low-flying, fast-moving missiles,” says Iain Boyd, director of the Center for National Security Initiatives at the University of Colorado. Which also makes it extremely well-prepared for an onslaught of drones. There are ways in which a drone is an easier threat to address because it is flying slower than rockets.
The Iron Dome, operational for well over a decade, comprises at least 10 missile-defense batteries strategically distributed around the country. The threat will be tracked by a command-and-control center and assessed if it is a false alarm or not. The system then fires interceptor missiles at the incoming rockets that seem most likely to hit an inhabited area.