The IDF on Sunday revealed the full story of how the Houthis’s Samad 3 drone traveled 2600 kilometers and penetrated Israel’s multitiered air defense system to kill one and wound around a dozen in Tel Aviv on Friday.
According to the IDF, the drone left Yemen, flying West toward Sudan.
It then turned North, flying through Sudan for an extended period until it reached southern Egypt.
From southern Egypt, it flew North until it reached the Sinai, then cut east into the Mediterranean Sea.
From the Mediterranean Sea, the Houthi drone continued to travel east, cutting slightly south to strike Tel Aviv when it got closer to the Israeli coastline.
Although Yemen is nominally 1800 kilometers from Israel, the deceptive path that the Houthis selected for the drone led to it traveling much farther, at 2600 kilometers for around 16 hours.
Identifying a blip on the screen
The IDF said that Iran and the Houthis replaced the original standard engine of the Samad 3 to allow it to travel the extra distance and better deceive Israel with its trajectory.
Next, the IDF said that the drone traveled between 80 and 100 kilometers per hour during its 16-hour tour.
When the dronewas relatively far out over the Mediterranean from Tel Aviv, a portion of Israel’s radar defenses picked up the drone as a blip on the air defense screen.
However, the soldier observing that monitor either missed seeing the blip entirely or otherwise overlooked it as a blip, considering that there have been innumerable false blips over nine months.
In addition, the IDF said that a drone attacking from Israel’s opposite eastern border appeared on the same radar screen around the same time, such that the Houthis might have set the radar operator up with a simultaneous distraction.
The IDF still did not explain the exact nature of why the radar operator failed. Still, it was made clear that her failure was not viewed as a significantly unprofessional miss but rather as the kind of low-grade error that, under the circumstances, could have happened to almost any operator.
In the future, the IDF did say that it was doubling the number of radar operators for such threats, such that at least two sets of eyes would look over all such threats, which should double the chance of adequately identifying threats.
The drone was finally flagged as a threat when it was only five minutes of travel away, an insufficient amount of time in this case to alert the air defense and warning systems.
Despite Houthi claims that changes they made to the drone made it undetectable to Israeli systems, the IDF said that was not the case.
Instead, though the drone was adjusted to use longer wings and carbon fiber to make it harder to detect, Israeli radar systems did their job to dictate it, and it was human error failing to flag the blip as dangerous that led to the drone penetrating Tel Aviv.
The IDF said that it has succeeded in shooting down the vast majority of around 1,000 drones sent against it from several distinct fronts for the nine-month war but that even its multitiered air defense is not airtight.
Moreover, the military said that Israeli enemies have tried many times to attack both Ashdod and Haifa with drones but that these have been shot down until now.
The IDF said that 40 out of 50 Hamas drones have been shot down and that Israel has shot down dozens of drones from Yemen. In comparison, the US has shot down most of the remaining 300 drones sent by the Houthis to attack Israel, and Israel has shot down around 80 of around 200 Iranian drones, with most others being shot down by the UDS or crashing prematurely.
In that sense, all of those fronts are viewed as a successful defense by the IDF, with the one front that is an exception being the Lebanon-Syria front, where the IDF has shot down only 150 out of 300 drones, with more of those drones hitting Israeli targets and causing both physical and financial harm.
To keep up with this incredible workload, the Air Force said that 40% of its personnel are now assigned air defense roles.
The IDF expects more attempts by Yemen to strike Israel, such as the ballistic missile fired at Eilat on Sunday morning. Still, it was unclear how intense these attacks would be or if they would be limited to the Eilat attacks, which have nearly all failed and which have caused no deaths to date.
It was also unclear how much the IDF would attack Yemen further to deter it from future drone strikes like the one on Tel Aviv.
Finally, it was unclear whether Yemen’s drone strike would lead to a more direct escalation between Israel and Iran, who unleashed the Houthis on Israel.
But the sense on Sunday from the IDF was that such a direct escalation was not imminent.
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