Iran's ‘monster missile' exposes Israel's Achilles' heel

Telegraph

3 days ago

It was the deadliest projectile Iran fired in its 12-day war with Israel – and it hit just before the ceasefire came into force.
Targeted at the southern desert city of Beersheba, the ballistic missile ripped off the entire side of a residential apartment block shortly before 6am on Tuesday, going on to explode against one of the many 'safe' rooms nestling inside the building.
The four people sheltering inside died instantly, bringing the total of Israeli fatalities to 28.
Only the previous day, Tehran announced that it had begun using the multi-warhead Kheibar Shekan (Ghadr-H) weapon against Israel, a so-called 'monster missile'.
While the IDF has not officially confirmed whether this munition was used in the Beersheba attack, Isaac Herzog, Israel's president, described the projectile in question as 'one of the heaviest missiles in the Iranian arsenal'.
That Iran, forced into an ignominious ceasefire, chose to sign off its missile campaign with such brutality sends a clear message.
Namely, should Israel decide to break the peace, its civilians will continue to die, and there is little that the Jewish state, despite its sophisticated air defence array, can do to stop it.
Tuesday's deaths followed a similar strike in Petah Tikva, east of Tel Aviv, on the first Sunday of the campaign, in which two people who had been following the rules by taking cover in a certified above-ground shelter were killed. Two others also died in the attack.
Despite staunch support for the war, these incidents have prompted deep soul-searching among civil society. Israelis know that future wars are probably a matter of when and not if.
That newfound sense of vulnerability was obvious this week in a series of vast tented cities in the concrete jungle tens of metres below the streets of Tel Aviv.
Shalhevet Freedman, 50, was just bedding down for the night, alongside her mother Claret, 75, and her 17-year-old daughter Daniella.
She said: 'I was staying in Petah Tikva because I thought it would be safer than Tel Aviv.
'I was actually close to the direct hit – I realised we weren't safe at all. We are more safe here.'
Ms Freedman was speaking four storeys below the Dizengoff Centre, a shopping mall in the heart of the city.
Under the glare of bright lights, the hastily repurposed car park is full of small silver tents as far as the eye can see.
Families, who either do not have access to a private shelter or no longer trust them, have carved out little corners where, previously, top-of-the-range electric cars would be charged up.
Ronen Koehler, from the campaign group Brothers and Sisters in Arms, is one of the organisers.
A former submarine captain, the 61-year-old knows a thing or two about encouraging people to work well together in confined spaces.
He said: 'The outside world thinks that Tel Aviv is full of modern shelters, but that's absolutely not the case.
'A lot of the buildings here went up in the 40s, 50s and 60s, so they are not equipped.'
Mr Koehler explained that the elderly and people with young children often struggle to make it to public shelters within the (approximately) 12 to 15 minutes provided by Israel's early warning system.
'You have young families, kids, being woken up two or three times a night, going down several storeys. Being able to sleep all night is a huge thing.'
He added that many younger people living on their own, even those with private shelters, prefer to come underground for the whole night.
'They're terrified of dying alone,' he said. 'Being with other people relaxes them.'
The inhabitants of the car park – a designated nuclear shelter – beneath the Dizengoff Centre is the Tel Aviv that the world does not see.
The city – with some justification – has a global image as a hyper-modern place full of cool young people who largely shrug off the missile threat.
But, on the final night of this round of Israel's decades-long confrontation with Iran, the people camping down for the night –many of whom are working class – look tired and frightened, refugees in their own city.
The enormous blast doors are kept open during raids to encourage people to run in.
Orit Baisa, a 41-year-old kindergarten medical worker, was cradling a pinscher rescue dog called Sandy.
She explained that she had spent more than a year trying to work on the animal's anxiety and aggression issues with various trainers, but the missiles were now causing 'catastrophic' panic attacks, meaning her pet needed to be medicated at all times.
A report submitted to the government shortly before Israel's attack on Iran's nuclear and missile programmes found that millions of Israeli citizens are without adequate protection from missiles.
It found that some 56 per cent of homes do not have a shelter, and 12,000 of Israel's public shelters are in a state of disrepair.
Most Israelis are probably unaware of the report's publication – but they would recognise its contents.
Rinat Weinberg, a mechanical engineer from Haifa, 29, said the so-called 'safe' room in her building lacked a proper door and was fortified in parts with sacks of rocks and sand, rather than regulation reinforced concrete.
She was down in the Dizengoff car park out of 'curiosity', but looked like she might stay for the night.
Ms Weinberg said: 'In Haifa we ended up sleeping in an underground railway station with the trains still coming past the platforms. It was crazy. We're nomads now.'
Following Saddam Hussein's Scud missile campaign in the first Gulf War, Israel passed a law mandating that all new residential apartments be built with a protected space.
Overall, the options are now broadly categorised as: Mamads, reinforced rooms within apartments or homes; Mamaks, communal protected space on each floor of a residential building, often in its core; and Miklat, public bomb shelters, often underground.
However, access to private shelters is heavily weighted away from the poor, the new report found.
Ample evidence of this during the recent campaign was to be found in the sprawling, dark and fetid concrete labyrinth in the bowels of Tel Aviv's central bus shelter, in the less affluent south of the city, where another tented community had sprung up.
Lyn Tagacay, a care worker from the Philippines, was trying to rock her 11-month-old son Kyle to sleep as midnight approached.
She said: 'We didn't have a bomb shelter near us, which meant I couldn't get to it in time without running.
'It was scary and I couldn't deal with it. It's easier to be down here.'
As the dust settles on the numerous missile strike sites, the debate over how Israel can better protect its civilians is getting started.
Despite Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu's victory statements, it is not yet known to what extent Iran retains any nuclear weapons capability, and therefore the likelihood of future Israeli attacks which would provoke a response.
But it is known that the Islamic Republic retains at least hundreds of ballistic missiles, against which Israel's air defence is capable, but not perfect.
The hundreds of people underground in Tel Aviv this week, and the nearly 10,000 displaced across the country, know this could all happen again before too long.