Satellite images show dozens of Iranian missiles hitting near Israeli air base: NPR

Researchers have used commercial satellite imagery to identify more than 30 spots where Iranian missiles appear to have hit an air base in southern Israel.

The images taken by the company Planet the day after the attack show damaged hangars, buildings, taxiways and a crater on one of the runways at the Nevatim air base. Videos posted on social media showed multiple warheads striking the base during Iran's Oct. 1 attack.

A section of satellite images from Planet shows damage to one of the runways.

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Israel and the United States have downplayed the attack, which Israel said consisted of around 180 ballistic missiles. Israel said many were intercepted by its missile defenses. Two U.S. destroyers also fired about a dozen interceptors to blunt the attack.

“This attack appears to be repelled and ineffective,” US national security adviser Jake Sullivan said shortly after the missiles hit.

“Our air force and air bases remain operational,” an Israeli military spokesman, Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, said in a briefing on the social media platform X.

According to the Israeli military, no aircraft were destroyed in the attack.

A complex picture

But Jeffrey Lewis, a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey who led the analysis, says his work “very complicates the picture.”

“We see more than 30 craters and damaged buildings,” Lewis says, “suggesting that more than 30 missiles hit the base.”

An image of Nevatim Air Base taken on October 2 shows damage to a hangar and runway caused by Iranian missile attacks.

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Iranian missiles also hit another base, Tel Nof air base in central Israel, and a smaller number of missiles struck near the headquarters of Israel's Mossad intelligence agency.

Based on preliminary calculations of events at Nevatim, Lewis believes that a significant number of Iranian missiles may have reached their targets.

“If Nevatim is representative, that would suggest that more than half got through,” he says.

Choose

There are several reasons why so many Iranian missiles may have penetrated Israeli air defenses. Israel's vaunted Iron Dome missile defense system can only intercept low-flying, short-range missiles like those used by Hezbollah and Hamas. Intercepting Iran's intermediate-range ballistic missiles requires Israel's more powerful and expensive Arrow 2 and Arrow 3 missile defense systems.

It's possible that the Arrow system didn't perform as expected, Lewis says, but he thinks it's more likely that Israel decided not to defend Nevatim in order to save its interceptors protecting population centers like Tel Aviv.

“It may be that they just don’t have that many Arrow 2 and Arrow 3 missiles,” Lewis says. If that was true, then “the Iranians managed to overwhelm the system and the Israelis had to choose.”

A view of a vehicle damaged by the Iranian attack in Tel Aviv. Relatively few rockets reached Israel's largest city, suggesting the military may have chosen to defend it over its air bases.

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“That would be my guess,” Lewis adds. “It didn’t look like they were trying to defend that base.”

Lewis notes that even though more than 30 rockets struck inside the base, the damage caused was still somewhat limited. This is notable because Iran is believed to have deployed some of its most advanced Fattah missiles.

“Even these missiles, which look much more accurate, still struggled to do any damage,” he says.

Still, he believes the attack showed Iran can attack targets deep inside Israel. “They can definitely get rockets through,” he says.