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On Saturday evening, in an attack without recent precedents, Iran attacked Israel with hundreds of drones and missiles: the former were almost all intercepted, the latter entered only a small part of Israeli territory. All in all, the damage was limited: it was minor damaged an Israeli military base and there were no deaths but only a few injuries, most of them slightly.
However, the attack, like the threats of the previous days, has raised strong concerns about the consequences that a direct military clash between Iran and Israel could have on the entire region. Iran possesses “one of the largest arsenals of drones and missiles in the entire Middle East”, he said al New York Times the expert Afshon Ostovar, and more generally one of the largest armies in the region. The weapons with which he attacked Israel are also much more sophisticated and precise of those used in recent months by Hamas and other groups at war against Israel.
Saturday’s attack was carried out with more than 300 drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles. More precise numbers were given by Avichay Adraee, spokesman for the Israeli army, who spoke of 170 drones, 30 cruise missiles and 120 ballistic missiles. The most evident damage was caused by ballistic missiles, which superficially hit some infrastructure at the Nevatim air force base, in the center of the country.
The information on the weapons used by Iran contradicted the news initially circulated on the attack by Iran, for which there was only talk of drones (those called “suicide” or “kamikaze”, i.e. unmanned vehicles that crash into a target by detonating its own explosive and self-destructing). The Iranian drone arsenal includes devices with ranges of over 2,000 kilometers, capable of flying at low altitude and evading radar.
However, drones are also relatively slow vehicles, which took hours to reach Israel (at least a thousand kilometers away): the first news of the launch of drones arrived around 10 pm Italian time, and only around 1 am did the first reports of vehicles arrive shot down by air defense systems over Israel. A 10-year-old girl from a small town near Arad was injured after being hit by shrapnel from a drone shot down by Israel, and is currently hospitalized in serious condition.
Even the first type of missiles used by Iran, cruise missiles, require a certain time to travel the entire distance to Israel, estimated at around two hours: they are vehicles that proceed on their journey powered by an engine and reach their target with a horizontal trajectory. None of these missiles reached Israeli territory.
The missiles that caused the greatest damage, and the fastest ones, were ballistic missiles: unlike cruise missiles, they are fired beyond the atmosphere and, exploiting gravity, fall on the target through a parabolic trajectory. When they fall on the target they are very fast, but they are also very inaccurate. Of the 120 ballistic missiles launched by Iran towards Israel, only a small part actually reached Israeli territory, and it was precisely this type of weapon that hit the Israeli military base of Nevatim, in the south of the country, causing minor damage to infrastructure.
In recent years, Iran has invested heavily in its military technology, also as a means to circumvent the sanctions imposed by several foreign governments on the regime, which have effectively limited Iran’s ability to purchase weapons from other states. Since the 1990s, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, the most important political and religious figure in the country, has invested many resources in the development of an autonomous and national weapons industry.
Iran has widely publicized its weapons, in the media and at military exercises, demonstrations and parades. It stores them in warehouses that are largely underground and fortified with defense systems capable of resisting external attacks. Iran also sells its weapons and military technologies to other countries: one of these is the Shahed 136 remote-controlled drones, widely used by Russia in Ukraine and second various reconstructions also in Saturday’s attack against Israel.
The Shahed 136s are manufactured by HESA, an Iranian state company. They are about 3 meters long and have a wingspan of 2.5. They can fly for more than 2 thousand kilometers autonomously, that is, following GPS coordinates, and carry up to approximately 50 kilos of explosives: they belong to the family of so-called “kamikaze drones”.
– Read also: Iranian drones used by Russia in Ukraine