Around 9,500 rockets have been fired on Israel by Hamas in the South and Hezbollah in the North since the start of the war on October 7, according to the IDF.
Of those 9,500, around 3,000 were fired in only the first four hours by Hamas. That number is even higher than the already staggering widely reported 2,200 rocket number most media carried in the early days of the war.
It dwarfs the number of rockets ever fired on Israel in a day by any enemy until now, with Hamas firing 4,500 rockets on Israel over 50 days during the entire 2014 Gaza conflict, a number which itself at the time was a major new high.
Despite this enormous threat, the IDF’s air defense shield has shot down the vast majority of rockets which threatened a civilian population (an algorithm leads the air defense not to waste interceptors on rockets which will clearly only land harmlessly in an open field.)
Unlike past rounds of conflict, the IDF has stalwartly refused to share the exact shoot-down success percentage, saying that the current conflict is the first full-scale war when information security and keeping Israeli enemies in the dark is more critical than in the smaller many prior “rounds of conflict.”
That said, in prior rounds, Iron Dome usually had a success shooting down rate of around 85-90% and top IDF officials have said that during this war, the IDF’s air defense has been comparable.
The IDF did say it has shot down thousands of rockets, including dealing with 2,000 more complex rockets and around a dozen drones.
Besides the general information security consideration, the current war is the first real multifront conflict Israel has fought since the 1973 Yom Kippur War, given that Hezbollah has been regularly firing rockets and anti-tank missiles from the North to supplement Hamas’ threat from the South.
Rockets from Yemen
Yemen has also tried to attack Israel with ballistic missiles and drones in a few incidents, with the IDF’s air defense using the Arrow missile system to shoot down a ballistic missile at a height of over 1,500 kilometers, and other Israeli and American air defense systems shooting down other threats.
Shooting down ballistic missiles is more complex not only because they must be shot down much farther away, but also because they have many components to them and the Arrow must strike the component that contains the explosives, and not the engine or various other pieces that break off from the rocket.
To defend against all of these threats, the IDF said that its air defense during this war has been both the most comprehensive and the most spread out ever.
This defense includes as far south as the Red Sea and as far north as Mount Dov.
The IDF said that to date 12% of Hamas rockets, or around 900, have fallen in Gaza.