"Iron Dome was something that people thought was impossible"
The Iron Dome is back in the news. After dozens of rockets were fired from Gaza at Israel’s south over Shabbos, Israeli media was flooded once again with images of missile interceptors clawing Hamas rockets from the skies.
The latest round of fighting comes a decade after the revolutionary missile system was first used in anger, downing a rocket headed for Ashkelon. In the interim, the Iron Dome — a translation of the Hebrew “Kipat Habarzel” — has achieved iconic status in Israel.
The story of how a giant gust of wind miraculously saved Tel Aviv’s Azrieli Towers from destruction in the 2014 Gaza war may be a legend. But the fact that it is still current in Israel is testament to Iron Dome’s rock-star status in a country under constant threat of bombardment.
Marking the ten years from that first shoot-down, Canadian native Shlomo Toaff, now a vice president at Israeli defense company Rafael, who oversees the ongoing Iron Down development, says that neither Hamas nor Iron Dome’s engineers have rested on their laurels. As the Gaza-based terror group imports ever more sophisticated military know-how, the Iron Dome — which has an effectiveness rate of over 90 percent — has become a vastly more capable system.
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