Israel claims control of Iran’s skies, but Tehran is managing to hit back

Israel says it has crippled Iran’s air defenses and that it can now strike targets across the country at will. Although Israel’s own defenses remain largely intact despite nightly barrages launched by Tehran, some missiles are getting through with deadly results.

Since Friday, Israel has used U.S.-supplied state-of-the-art F-35 fighters and other aircraft to carry out hundreds of airstrikes against Iran’s air defenses and sites it says are being used to develop nuclear weapons. Not a single Israeli aircraft has been shot down in the operation so far, Israel authorities says.

Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, appearing Sunday on Fox News, also offered details of what he described as a successful Israeli intelligence operation to infiltrate western Iran and disable its remaining air defenses in the area. As a result of the Mossad operation, Israel has a “free highway to Tehran,” Netanyahu said.

Chuck Freilich, a former deputy national security advisor in Israel who is now at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, says Israel has “succeeded quite nicely in clearing Iranian airspace so that it can conduct operations against other sites.”

Freilich acknowledges that while all of Iran’s air defenses have yet to be destroyed “the vast majority… those that might pose a significant threat to Israeli aircraft have [been].”

In October, during tit-for-tat missile and drone attacks between Israel and Iran, Tehran’s air defenses reportedly sustained serious damage. Israel likely believed that Iran couldn’t withstand a major air assault at the moment, a fact that likely played a role in the timing of the current operation.

Israel’s main targets include Iran’s two most important nuclear sites that are used for processing, or “enriching” radioactive uranium into the purity needed to produce atomic weapons. The first is the Natanz uranium enrichment site, which is largely underground and the second is the Fordow enrichment site built deep inside a mountain. They are particularly challenging to destroy and it isn’t clear if that can be done without additional help from the U.S., which could provide Israel with special bunker-busting bombs to penetrate the underground facilities.

President Trump has expressed strong support for Israel, but has made clear that the U.S. is not at the moment part of Israel’s operation, which has also included strikes that resulted in the deaths of top Iranian commanders and reportedly dozens of civilians.

Israel’s missile defenses are a multipronged and overlapping systems designed to take out different kinds of threats. The best known of these is Iron Dome, which fires interceptor missiles at incoming short-range rockets, such as those that have frequently been fired by Hamas since the start of the Gaza war. Since October 2023, the system has taken down all but a few missiles fired by Iran and its regional proxies — not only Hamas, but Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, and the Yemen-based Houthis.

Since Sunday, however, Iran has unleashed waves of missiles against Israel, in attacks apparently designed to overwhelm Israel’s defenses. Several Iranian missiles got through on Monday morning and caused considerable damage in Israel. Eight Israeli civilians were killed when missiles hit apartment buildings. Another missile hit a fuel refinery in the coastal city of Haifa, touching off a huge blaze.

As incoming Iranian missiles are hit by Israel’s defenses, they break up into large fragments that are still dangerous. So, Iron Dome is now being used to shoot down those falling fragments, according to Freilich.

Meanwhile, Israel says it has eliminated about a third of Iran’s estimated 100 mobile launchers for firing ballistic missiles. They are considered challenging targets because they are able to easy hide and are designed to “shoot and scoot” to avoid detection. “Iran is a big, mountainous country. It’s not easy to find them,” Freilich says.

The more mobile launchers that Israel can destroy, the less able Iran will be to strike back. “The primary objective in the campaign against the missiles is to eliminate the launchers rather than the missiles themselves,” he says.