New Delhi: With Israel starting a ground offensive targeting Iran-backed Hezbollah and armed Palestinian groups in southern Lebanon, Iran late Tuesday fired a barrage of at least 180 missiles at Israel that reportedly include the newly-developed Fattah-1 hypersonic missile and the medium-range Shahab-3 missile.
The attack escalates and complicates the security situation in West Asia and comes after Israel killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in an airstrike in Beirut last week.
Israel Tuesday attacked the Palestinian refugee camp of Ein el-Hilweh in Lebanon, according to an Al Jazeera report.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) posted on X what they termed as “raw footage” of missiles raining over the Old City in Jerusalem. The IDF also conveyed that approximately 10 million civilians had become targets of the projectiles and that all Israeli civilians had taken to bomb shelters.
Israel has vowed retaliation for the missile attack.
In April this year, Iran had launched a similar missile attack on Israel. The recent one is, however, said to be the largest attack given the sheer number of missiles launched by Iran.
According to a report in The Guardian, Iran has said that it launched the missiles toward “three Israeli military bases” as a response to Israeli strikes in Lebanon against Hezbollah. Iran has also claimed that Israeli attacks had devastated the southern suburbs of Beirut, the capital of Lebanon, as well as villages in the country’s south.
In its attack on Israel, Iran is said to have used the Fattah-1 hypersonic missile.
Hypersonic missiles are difficult to intercept given their nature, flying at more than five times the speed of sound. They also follow a complex trajectory.
A report by CNN said it is the first time that Iran has used the Fattah-1 missile, which has a speed of Mach 5 or about 6,100 km per hour.
Dr Jeffrey Lewis, professor at Middlebury Institute of International Studies and staff at James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS) wrote on X Wednesday: “The initial reaction among the @JamesMartinCNS OSINT team is we’re seeing more debris from newer Fattah-1 solid-fuel missiles than we did in April, which may explain the apparently more successful nature of the strike-although it’s early and more data could change our minds.”
It was in June last year that the Fattah missile was unveiled by the late Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and senior commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The missile, Iran then said, had been made domestically and was capable of penetrating missile defence systems.
At the time, Iranian state media had quoted Amirali Hajizadeh, head of the IRGC’s aerospace force, as saying: “The precision-guided Fattah hypersonic missile has a range of 1,400 km and it is capable of penetrating all defense shields.”
The state media also said that Fattah’s top speed reached Mach 14 levels (nearly 15,000 km per hour), and that the missile was capable of penetrating the “enemy’s advanced anti-missile systems and is a big generational leap in the field of missiles”, in an apparent reference to Israel and its Iron Dome missile defence system.
According to CNN, Iran has also used the liquid-fuelled Shahab-3 ballistic missile in its attack on Israel.
The Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies classifies Shahab-3 as a Medium-Range Ballistic Missile. It entered service in Iran in 2003.
It was after Iran purchased a North Korean No Dong 1 missile in the mid-1990s that Tehran established the infrastructure necessary to assemble a domestic version of the missile, named the Shahab-3, it said.
The range of the missile is about 1,300 km but is said to vary depending upon the weight of the payload.
A 2021 report of the Missile Threat Project states: “Iran possesses the largest and most diverse missile arsenal in the Middle East, with thousands of ballistic and cruise missiles, some capable of striking as far as Israel and southeast Europe.”
It added that for the past decade, Iran had invested significantly to improve these weapons’ precision and lethality.
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)
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