The longrange missiles fired by Houthi rebels are Iranianmade
The longrange antiaircraft system Israelknown as Arrow or Hetz, achieved a historic military feat on the 2nd by intercepting a missile outside Earth’s atmosphere, Israeli newspaper Haaertz reports.
The missile is one of many the rebels have Houthisa proIranian terrorist group, started in recent weeks from Yemen towards Israel the two countries are about 2,000 km apart.
There has never been a battle beyond the 100 km altitude limit the socalled Kármán line that separates the Earth’s atmosphere from space, emphasizes the French newspaper Le Figaro.
“Yemen made history by becoming the first country to enter space combat,” Eurasia Group analyst Gregory Brew wrote on X (formerly Twitter).
The Israeli Air Force and the Israeli Army limited themselves to saying that the Yemeni missile was detected and shot down “at the most appropriate time and location.”
The video below shows the moment of the interception.
The missile in question is an Iranianmade Qader. Recently, shots fired by the Houthis were fired near southern Israel, specifically in the city of Eilat.
According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Missile Threat Project, the Arrow 2 was developed in a partnership between Israel and the United States in the 1990s and deployed in its first units in 2000.
Arrow 2 is a missile defense system that uses a twostage solid propellant to reach speeds of up to Mach 9 (nine times the speed of sound in the atmosphere: 11,100 km/h).
The rocket is 6.95 m long, has a diameter of 0.8 m and weighs 1,300 kg. It has an explosive fragmentation warhead with fins to direct the blast in the direction dictated by the missile’s seeker.
If the missile does not hit the target directly, the warhead explodes at a distance of 40 m to 50 m from the target. The Arrow 2 has two seekers an active radar and a USmade infrared seeker for navigation and warhead deployment.
The Arrow 2’s command and control system is capable of tracking and engaging 14 targets simultaneously.
The system’s Green Pine radar is a 3D phased array radar approximately 12 m long and 5 m high, with separate power, cooling and communications vehicles.
In addition to its own defense, Israel relies on the Support for US ships stationed in the Red Sea.
On Saturday (4), the Navy reported that an attack group consisting of the aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, the guidedmissile cruiser USS Philippine Sea, the guidedmissile destroyers USS Mason and USS Gravely is from Destroyer Squadron 22 and Carrier Air Wing 3 with its nine Squadrons had arrived in the Red Sea after crossing the Suez Canal from the Mediterranean.
Last week, The Houthis threatened to attack Israeli nuclear facilitiesin the city of Dimona, in the Negev desert, in the south of the country.
In an image shared by the Houthis, the Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Center appears in the center of a target drawing that reads in Hebrew and Arabic: “We will not hesitate.”
“Dimona is within range of our missiles,” the extremists added.
Photos of the wreckage of a Quds alMujahid rocket in a desert area in southern Jordan are circulating in groups on Telegram.
The missile, fired about 1,500 kilometers off the coast of Yemen, would specifically target Israeli nuclear facilities in the Negev Desert.
Iron Dome: How Israel’s Missile Defense System Works
Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system has been used extensively to prevent attacks by the terrorist group Hamas from reaching targets on Israeli territory. The images of the use of this weapon are striking in their precision, even given the large number of rockets fired by Hamas
The Iron Dome was developed by Israeli companies with US support and has been in operation since 2011. “The Iron Dome is an Israeli missile defense system designed to intercept shortrange missiles and artillery. Its origins lie in the 2006 war between Israel and the Lebanese group Hezbollah, when numerous rockets were fired into Israeli territory,” explains Bernardo Wahl, professor at the FESPSP (Foundation School of Sociology and Politics in São Paulo) and specialist in Security and Defense
A radar is responsible for indicating the region of an enemy attack. After the system tracks the trajectory and risk of hitting the target, a projectile is fired to neutralize the missile. The expert explains that the missile defense system can detect whether the device falls into an uninhabited area and decide not to intercept it.
According to the Israeli army, the effectiveness of the Iron Dome is 85 to 90%. “Although the system is quite effective, it is not perfect and has an ‘Achilles heel’: if many missiles are fired at the same time, the Iron Dome can become overloaded and not perform all the necessary interception operations,” says the FESPSP professor.
That’s exactly what happened last Saturday. If numerous missiles are fired at the same time, the system is overloaded and its effectiveness decreases. This would explain why the Israeli defense was caught off guard by the attack. Wahl stresses that the war will depend on Israel’s ability to keep its shield fully operational and the size of Hamas’s missile stockpile to attack Israeli territory.