Breaching the Iron Dome: the Iranian cluster bombs bypassing Israeli air defences

On 5 March, a post appeared on the X account of Iran’s late supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, managed by his staff after he was killed in an Israeli airstrike on 28 February.

“On 5 March, a post appeared on the X account of Iran’s late supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, managed by his staff after he was killed in an Israeli airstrike on 28 February”

The Guardian

The tweet featured a stark piece of propaganda: a gleaming, oversized missile arcing across the sky as a city below is engulfed in flames.

The Guardian

The Khorramshahr missile, Iran’s most advanced ballistic missile, is believed to be capable of carrying a cluster warhead dispersing up to 80 submunitions.

Since that post, it has come to loom large in Israeli threat assessments, a persistent concern for a country equipped with a multi-layered missile defence system that is widely regarded as the world’s most sophisticated.

The Guardian, which reviewed the impact of dozens of Iranian strikes alongside statements from Israeli officials, has identified at least 19 ballistic missiles carrying cluster warheads that penetrated Israeli airspace and struck urban areas since the beginning of the war with Iran on 28 February.

Those attacks have killed at least nine people and wounded dozens, reflecting a broader shift in Iran’s tactics that appears to have exposed a vulnerability in Israel’s air defences.

Cluster munitions are designed to release dozens of smaller bombs over a wide area, and the latest attacks show Iran’s use of such payloads as it seeks to challenge Israel’s air defences.

Roughly half of the missiles launched since the escalation have carried cluster warheads, and the Guardian review finds at least 19 ballistic missiles with cluster submunitions that penetrated Israeli airspace and struck urban areas, killing nine people and wounding dozens.

The Guardian

Intercepting cluster munitions is fundamentally more difficult than stopping unitary missiles because submunitions disperse mid-air; an interceptor must strike the carrier before dispersal for a chance at neutralisation.

Once the bomblets are released, interception becomes virtually impossible even with advanced defences.

Cluster munitions are inherently indiscriminate, and their use in populated areas is prohibited under international humanitarian law.

“On 5 March, a post appeared on the X account of Iran’s late supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, managed by his staff after he was killed in an Israeli airstrike on 28 February”

The Guardian

The 2008 convention on cluster munitions bans them for signatory states, but neither Israel nor Iran are party to it.

Amnesty International condemned Iran’s use of cluster munitions last June during its 12-day war with Israel as a flagrant violation of international law, and the organisation accused Israel of similar breaches over its use in Lebanon in 2006.

Israel has acknowledged deploying cluster munitions in the past, maintaining that it does so in line with international law, but described Iran’s use near a population as a war crime by the Iranian regime.

Videos circulating online show cluster munitions descending as dozens of bright points of light over greater Tel Aviv before impact.

In the early morning of 18 March, two strikes killed a couple in their 70s in Ramat Gan and a 30-year-old Thai worker in Adanim.

The Guardian

Israeli officials say that even a direct intercept of a ballistic missile, before its warhead splits and scatters its payload, does not always ensure the submunitions are fully neutralised, and Tehran’s strategy may aim to drain interceptor stocks by forcing Israel to expend missiles to neutralise a single threat.

Over the weekend, Iranian ballistic missile barrages wounded nearly 200 people in southern Israel, including Arad and Dimona, as the sirens and air defences persist.

A Guardian investigation last year found evidence of Israel having used cluster munitions in Lebanon during its war with Hezbollah starting in October 2023, with remnants identified near the Litani River; the Guardian does not have information about the strikes the shells were used in, as remnants were found after the fact.