In the early hours of Tuesday, the Hamas terrorist group fired multiple anti-aircraft missiles at Israeli jets conducting airstrikes in the Gaza Strip. Israeli Defense Forces, targeting Hamas sites after a rocket fired at Israel from Gaza hours earlier, said the rockets did not damage any aircraft.
Palestinian media presented the use of the missiles as a new, game-changing capability, and Hamas itself later released a video showing the attempt.
But not only are these capabilities not new to Hamas and other Gaza-based terrorist groups, experts say they are highly unlikely to succeed.
The first use of an SA-7 shoulder rocket, also known as a Strela-2, reported by Hamas was in October 2012. In November of the same year, Hamas also released a video claiming without any evidence to have hit an Israeli F -16 jet with the missile.
In fact, Gaza groups have had no known success using anti-aircraft missiles against Israeli planes.
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The Strela-2 shoulder-launched air defense system, manufactured by the Soviet Union in the early 1970s, uses primitive infrared tracking to acquire a target, commonly known as “heat seeking”.
A well-known Western weapons expert, who writes anonymously on Twitter under the pseudonym Caliber Obscura and whose reports have been cited by The Guardian, AFP, Vice and others, told The Times of Israel that Israeli planes were heavily using flares to trick the system most common and easiest countermeasure.
The system also requires a thermal battery to launch the rocket. As the original batteries tend to degrade over time, Palestinian groups have apparently resorted to making their own makeshift versions to keep the 60-year-old system functional.
“Sometimes they can function beyond their shelf life,” said Caliber Obscura, which he estimated at around 15 to 20 years, “but often not, especially when storage conditions weren’t optimal.”
He said Hamas appeared to have improvised a battery solution, much like rebel groups in Syria had done during the course of the country’s civil war. “You can sort of cobble together laptop batteries…or car batteries,” he said. The original batteries are also disposable, so a rechargeable solution can be ideal if the group has a supply of rockets.
But even with improvised batteries on the 50-year-old system, “you’re also dealing with some of these missiles that are 40, 45 years old,” Caliber Obscura said, meaning they may not perform exactly as intended.
Israeli officials previously estimated that the system was smuggled into the coastal enclave from Libya in the early 2010s. Caliber Obscura said it suspects this is the case, but because the system is so common, it could have come from elsewhere.
“It was good in the ’70s, especially with the updated versions, but it’s pretty old these days,” he said.
Still, the terrorist groups in Gaza are known to have another Soviet system, the 9K38 Igla, which the expert described as “more modern and functional” than the Strela, citing Ukraine’s recent successful use against Russian planes during the Moscow invasion of the country across the country led last month.
But the Igla also uses similar heat-seeking technology that can be easily countered.
“If you had an Israeli helicopter that for some reason slept on the job and flew low and didn’t use flares or other countermeasures…then technically [it could hit],” he said.
That being said, the Israeli Air Force will likely continue to operate freely over the Palestinian enclave.
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