adminDescribing the recent retaliatory rocket attacks against Israel’s largest city and financial hub by the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas as “a powerful symbolic message to Israel,” a Thursday report by major US-based news radio station NPR raises major questions about the effectiveness of the regime’s anti-missile defence system, promoted as Iron Dome.
Citing US and Israeli military and political experts, the radio network disputes official estimates by the Tel Aviv regime and Washington that the anti-missile system intercepted over 90 percent of the incoming Hamas rockets, saying that a more reasonable figure for its rate of effectiveness would be between 50 and 75 percent.
Quoting Michael Rubin, a prominent pro-Israeli ‘Middle East analyst’ with the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, the report emphasises that “this rocket contest” may offer insight into a potential Israeli military encounter with the Islamic Republic of Iran, with the Iranians having gained a better idea about the functions and effectiveness of the well-publicized ‘Iron Dome.’
“Especially when it wants to calm its domestic audience, it (the Israeli regime) needs to show that it’s not going to continue to place these population centres under threat and that it’s doing something about it.”
The report concludes by reiterating that Israeli calculations on the extent of the threat posed by such long-range rockets would be critical in determining its “readiness to go to war with Iran,” adding that Iranian defence authorities “are very likely assessing their ability to make Israel pay.” — Presstv
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