How and why did Hezbollah succeed at hitting Ramat Gan on Monday night?
And why did the IDF first say that they had shot down the Hezbollah ballistic missile, only for the police to contradict them, and for the military to later put out an amended message that indicated both the IDF and the police had some part of the story right?
Shortly before 9 p.m. Monday, Hezbollah fired a ballistic missile at the Tel Aviv area.
The Iron Dome is generally not capable of shooting down ballistic missiles due to their speed and different trajectory from cheaper Hezbollah rockets.
Alternatively, David’s Sling and the Arrow 2 and 3 missile defense systems are each capable of shooting down different kinds of ballistic missiles, with David’s Sling focused on medium-range missiles and the Arrow systems capable of shooting down longer-range missiles up in the atmosphere.
The IDF fired off interceptors to destroy the ballistic missile, striking it at a height of around 12 km. high in the sky.So the military was correct when it said that it struck the Hezbollah missile.
The IDF did strike the missile
However, it also said that some shrapnel from the missile had then fallen to Ramat Gan causing some damage.This was not entirely correct.
The police who were on site saw that a large part of the still-held-together ballistic missile landed in Ramat Gan on a bus, causing an explosion and fires, and wounding people nearby.Based on seeing the large amount that remained of the missile, they concluded it had not been shot down.They were also partially correct.What happened was that the Israeli interceptor struck the ballistic missile, but for reasons that are now being probed, did not cause it to explode as designed.
Rather, a small part of the missile exploded, but a larger part was simply cut off from the rest, leading it to drop relatively straight down at high speed from the 12 kilometer shoot-down point.
The fact that so much of the missile remained whole was part of why the damage was much larger than usual, and larger than it would have been if what had fallen out of the sky had “just” been smaller pieces of shrapnel.
On the flip side of the coin, because the ballistic missile was cut in half, it also did not have the full destructive impact that it would have had if it had not been shot down at all.
Overall, the IDF would like to present this incident broadly as a success because the missile was hit.
But as more people get killed or wounded and it’s happening deeper inside the country’s borders, questions about how long and competently the air defense systems can protect the public will also get louder.