Israel prevails in tit-for-tat air warfare with Iran as Tehran's proxies weaken

Iran's defences have failed to shield against Israel's advanced air capabilities

An anti-Israel billboard depicting Iran's recent missile attack on Israel and a sentence reading in Persian 'If you want war, we are the master of war', at the Enghelab Square in Tehran, Iran, on OctoShow more

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Israel's overnight raids on Iran showed the might of one of the world's best equipped air forces, with the strike calibrated to draw little or no retaliation as Israel aims to consolidate its gains against Tehran's Middle East proxies.

Early reports suggest heavy damage to at least one Iranian missile factory and the deaths of two soldiers, after Israel said more than 100 fighter jets, including F-35 stealth planes, struck targets in Iran in the early hours of Saturday. The attack appears to have been designed to mollify the US, while keeping Israel's long-term goal of neutralising Hezbollah and Hamas, a former Jordanian General Intelligence Directorate official said.

“The Israelis sent a message that they can strike Tehran at will, but in a way that minimises chances of Iranian retaliation,” said Saud Al Sharafat, who heads the Shorufat Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Terrorism in Amman. “Israel does not want to undermine its objectives in Lebanon and in Gaza.”

The strikes mark the second retaliatory round between the two countries since April, amid Israel's war with Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Shortly after the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7 last year, hostilities between Iran and Israel rose to critical levels, with Iran activating what it termed a unified front against Israel, or multipronged attacks by militias from Syria, Yemen and Iraq against Israeli targets.

Videos on social media early on Saturday showed Iranian air defences appearing to fire blindly into the Tehran night. There were reports of heavy GPS jamming across Iran appearing not to have disrupted the Israeli attack. At the start of this month, Iran had fired a barrage of missiles in retaliation for the Israeli assassination of Hamas and Hezbollah leaders. The missiles were intercepted with the help of the US and other allies of Washington.

Nuclear arsenal

Israel is widely believed to possess a nuclear arsenal. And Iran has been developing capabilities that could enable it to build one at a short notice, according to western officials. The US had urged Israel to limit its response this time and stay away from Iranian nuclear facilities and its oil industry, which underpins Iran’s economy.

Scenarios Israel is envisaging on its borders are unlikely to be disrupted, Mr Sharafat said. These include forcing Hezbollah to withdraw from southern Lebanon and replacing it with the Lebanese Army, which has the unwritten creed of not fighting Israel, and driving Hamas commanders out of Gaza to a country willing to take them.

Hamas, however, has resisted such offers and still has fighting capabilities in the strip. The war in Gaza started after Hamas and other militant Palestinian groups supported by Iran killed 1,200 people in the October 7 attack. Almost 43,000 people have been killed in the subsequent Israeli invasion of Gaza, according to health officials in the Hamas-ruled strip.

A Jordanian political source connected with Hezbollah and Hamas said that the weakening of the two groups since last year, especially Hezbollah, limits Iran’s capabilities to damage Israel from close range, thus discouraging Tehran from engaging in sustained direct hostilities between the two countries.

Total air supremacy

The success of Saturday’s strike, as well as the multiple attack wave aspect, was widely expected, air warfare experts have told The National. Iran’s reportedly formidable air defences, including S-300PMU2 missile batteries, the 30N6E2 radar system and Bavar 373 air defence systems, have appeared powerless to stop the waves of strikes.

On paper, Iran's missile systems and radars can track dozens of targets at once, over hundreds of kilometres. But Israel had been working on defeating this threat for years, studying the S-300 since at least 2014 during military exercises with Greece, which obtained one of the systems from Cyprus.

“Israelis have been flying against the kind of air defence systems that the Iranians have since the 1967 war, and they've been flying against those in Syria, too,” Thomas Withington, an expert on air power and electronic warfare, told The National earlier this month.

The S-300 was previously sent to Syria, lent to its military by Russia, probably allowing Israel to build a detailed profile of its powerful radar, and how it could be jammed or evaded. Critical to this effort was the F-35I, Israel’s variant of the F-35 stealth fighter, which is barely detectable to all but the most powerful radar and collects information on enemy radar systems, storing it in a database so enemy signals can instantly be identified and countermeasures can be put into action.

While it is too early to say exactly how the strike unfolded, Israel almost certainly used a combination of hard-to-detect F-35Is and fast-moving air-launched ballistic missiles. Similar weapons, plunging from high altitude at speed, have defeated S-300 systems used by Russia and Ukraine.

One of those air-launched weapons – either ROCKS or Blue Sparrow – was widely believed to have been used in Israel’s April strike that destroyed a radar of Iran’s S-300 at Isfahan airbase. The Golden Horizon, thought to be a US designation for Blue Sparrow, was mentioned in leaked US intelligence documents studying a possible Israeli strike last week.

The “stand-off” range of these weapons meant that non-stealth jets would have been able to bomb Iranian radar and missile sites far outside their radar detection range, in some cases outside Iranian airspace due to their long range. The weapons possess “terrain-matching” guidance, meaning that they do not rely on GPS satellite guidance and therefore, are difficult for defenders to “jam” by blocking signals between the weapon and Global Positioning Systems.

Robert Dalsjo, senior analyst at the Swedish Defence Research Agency, said that an Israeli strike would probably come in waves. Israel may first strike against air defence targets and then go for the real targets, perhaps using F15s that can carry a lot more ordinance than stealthy F35s.

“So, a strike by the F-35s to take out air defence radar and air defence installations, and then the second wave after that to take out the real targets” could be expected, he said.

Bill Sweetman, an aerospace defence expert, believes Israel may have used advanced jamming capabilities to scramble Iranian radar systems in a way hitherto unseen in modern air warfare. Leaked US documents last week suggested Israel may have used a “covert” long-range drone for the operation.

“A multi-axis attack using precision stand-off weapons and advanced electronic warfare is not something we have seen before and would be very hard to defend against,” Mr Sweetman said.