In the face of continued rocket fire from the Gaza Strip, Israel will deploy a
fourth battery of the Iron Dome rocketdefense system in the coming weeks, Israel
Air Force Col. Tzvika Haimovitch said on Sunday.
Speaking to
reporters at the location of an Iron Dome battery in Ashdod, Haimovitch, who is
the commander of the Air Defense unit responsible for the Iron Dome, said that
the system was demonstrating impressive results and “was being stretched to the
max.”
On Sunday, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu visited the Iron Dome
battery protecting Ashdod, and was briefed on the performance of the
system.
The IDF is hoping to secure funding from the government for the
continued production and delivery of additional Iron Dome batteries and
interceptors.
Defense officials have said that Israel requires at least
13 batteries to effectively protect itself against rockets fired from the Gaza
Strip and Lebanon.
A team of engineers from the IAF and Iron Dome
developer Rafael were looking into a possible technical malfunction that
occurred at the battery protecting Beersheba, which allowed two rockets to slam
into the city on Sunday. An empty school was hit and no one was injured.
Since the beginning of the recent violence between
Israel and Palestinian terrorist groups in the Gaza Strip, the three Iron Dome
batteries deployed in the South have successfully intercepted 39 rockets,
including 11 as of Sunday at 5 p.m.
The battery protecting Ashdod has
successfully intercepted nearly all of the rockets that were launched at the
city since the rocket fire began on Friday, in response to Israel’s
assassination of the leader of the Popular Resistance Committees in Gaza, who
was said to be planning an attack against Israel along the border with
Egypt.
Since then, around 160 rockets have been fired from
Gaza. 95 landed in Israel, around 40 were intercepted by the Iron Dome –
including a dozen on Sunday – and the rest fell inside Gaza.
“The
interception rate has been high, but there is no such thing as a hermetic
defense, and only a combination of the Iron Dome with other defensive measures
will provide the utmost protection for the public,” Haimovitch said. “The
more batteries we deploy, the better the protection we will be able to
provide.”
The Iron Dome’s interception success rate this year is over 90
percent, up from around 75% in 2011.
The Iron Dome is designed to defend
against rockets at a range of 4-70 kilometers. Each battery consists of a mini
multi-mission radar manufactured by Israel Aerospace Industries and three
launchers, each equipped with 20 interceptors called Tamirs.
The radar
enables Iron Dome operators to predict the impact site of the enemy rocket and
if it is slated to hit an open area, to refrain from intercepting it. Each
interceptor costs between $50,000- 100,000 and usually two are fired at rockets
slated for interception.
