Israeli investigation: How did the "Iron Dome" collapse in the first hours of the Al-Aqsa flood?

A new Israeli military investigation revealed, on Monday, that the Iron Dome anti-missile system collapsed in the first hours of the October 7, 2023 attack (Al-Aqsa Flood).

On that day, Palestinian factions, most notably Hamas, carried out a surprise attack on Israeli settlements and military bases, which resulted in the killing, capture and detention of soldiers and settlers in the Gaza Strip, without the Israeli army being able to predict this in advance and prevent it from happening or deal with it in a way that would prevent their capture, in response to “the occupation’s attacks on the Palestinian people and Al-Aqsa Mosque,” according to a Hamas statement.

Channel 12 reported that "the Israeli army's investigations reveal a serious failure in the Iron Dome system in the first hours of Hamas' surprise attack."

"3,700 rockets were fired in the first 4 hours of the attack, half of which were not intercepted, the batteries were exhausted within hours, and the mass infiltration of militants prevented rearmament," she added.

Israel has long boasted about its Iron Dome system, a joint Israeli-American project, for intercepting short- and medium-range missiles.

But investigations conducted by the Israeli army into the details of the surprise attack showed that Hamas was able to overcome it.

The Israeli channel indicated that "the operational investigations submitted to the Chief of Staff revealed worrying malfunctions in the air defense system during the critical hours of the October 7 attack."

She added, "For unspecified security reasons, several Iron Dome batteries around Gaza suffered a malfunction in the first minutes of the attack. This means a complete absence of interception operations from those batteries."

lack of early warning

The Israeli channel continued, "In the face of an unprecedented barrage of missiles, the air defense system operated routinely due to the lack of early intelligence warning."

She stated that "the intensity of the attack was unprecedented, as 3,700 rockets were fired at the surrounding settlements in the first four hours."

She explained that "1,400 of them were launched in the first 20 minutes of the attack alone. After several hours, the additional batteries were emptied of their ammunition, which resulted in half of the missile launches not being intercepted."

She pointed out that "the situation worsened when the massive infiltration of militants (from Gaza) prevented the possibility of re-arming the exhausted batteries."

"In one case, a female officer and two soldiers were killed as they were heading to a battery while transporting ammunition in a truck," she said.

The Israeli army did not immediately issue a statement on the channel's report, but Israeli political, military and security officials described the October 7, 2023 attack as a "political, military, intelligence and security failure."

Following the attack, Israel, with American support, committed genocide in the Gaza Strip between October 7, 2023 and January 19, 2025, leaving more than 159,000 dead and wounded, most of them children and women, and more than 14,000 missing, in one of the worst humanitarian disasters in the world.

Source: Anadolu Agency