The ballistic missile fired by Yemen at Israel at 6:21 a.m. on Sunday morning was not a hypersonic missile as the Houthis have claimed, the IDF said Tuesday night.
Further, the IDF said that the missile was not an especially new advanced kind of maneuvering missile that could outwit Israel’s air defense systems.
Rather, the IDF said that it fired multiple interceptors, including both the Arrow 2 and the Iron Dome, against the missile and that at least one interceptor struck the missile but failed to destroy it completely on impact.
Instead, the impact of the interceptor led the missile to break up in Israeli airspace and fall mostly in an open field near Kfar Daniel, with other pieces of multiple interceptors falling in other areas, such as the Paatei Modiin Train Station and Rehovot.
The IDF will now probe why the interceptor impact only caused the missile to break up and did not completely destroy it.
In fact, the IDF also said that the warhead remained intact when it struck the open area, which was one of the reasons why a significant fire was caused.
However, it appears that once the IDF saw the missile break up over the Kfar Daniel open area, it decided it was no longer worthwhile to keep targeting it.
Questions over IDF’s response
At the same time, the IDF’s response raised other questions.
Why didn’t the Arrow 3 destroy the ballistic missile up in Earth’s atmosphere? Why was it necessary to fire multiple interceptors?
A ballistic missile being shot down only once it has already entered Israeli airspace is already a failure of sorts.
Even if Israel is not outmatched by a specific new hypersonic technology, the fact remains that the air defenses did not achieve their goals, and this is something that the Houthis, Iran, and others can learn from and exploit in the future, even as the IDF tries to conceal the reasons for its failure at this time.
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