The most recent round of violence between Israel and the Gaza Strip on May 4 and 5 was more violent and deadlier than the ones before. For the first time in a long while, Israel’s military skipped directly to measures it usually reserves for more advanced stages of such fighting, killing Hamas targets and demolishing the organization’s command centers located in residential apartment buildings in Gaza. Hamas and the Islamic Jihad seem to have had the same idea of an advanced fighting stage. According to Arab media reports, the two groups tried to breach the defenses of Israel’s anti-missile Iron Dome batteries with heavy barrages designed to overwhelm the system’s interceptor rockets and improve the prospects of penetration. “Iron Dome’s success rate is still high,” an Israeli security source told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity, “but when you let loose many missiles at once, naturally the numbers of non-intercepted missiles grow accordingly. It is still the same 8% [of non-intercepted missiles], but when 10 missiles penetrate the defenses, the effect is different than when two do.”
For Israel, this resulted in a grim toll: four civilian deaths and searing, incontrovertible proof that it cannot defend itself hermetically against a hail of rockets, anti-tank missiles and artillery shells, a further indication that the addiction to Iron Dome has some unhealthy aspects, as well.
