DUBAI (Dispatches) -- Iran’s barrage of ballistic missiles this week appears to have overwhelmed Israel’s air defenses, the Washington Post reported, citing independent researchers who examined emerging satellite imagery.
“This means that any new Iranian strikes against Israel, if launched, could have much more serious consequences if they target civilian infrastructure or heavily populated residential areas,” the paper said.
“That’s an important consideration as Israel contemplates its military response. Tehran has threatened strikes on Israeli power plants and oil refineries if Israel hits Iranian territory in a counterattack expected in the coming days,” it added.
Unlike April 13, when Iran fired a large number of cruise missiles and drones, Tuesday’s barrage was made up exclusively of some 180 much faster ballistic missiles, one of the largest such strikes in the history of warfare. Analysts say that most of these projectiles were Iran’s most modern ballistic missiles, the Fattah-1 and Kheibar Shekan.
“The faster the missile, the harder it is to intercept it, that’s simple physics,” Ulrich Kühn, head of research for arms control at the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy in Hamburg, told the Post. 
“It’s certainly much harder to defend against ballistic missiles, and even more so if there is a bulk of them coming in on a certain target, because then you have the ability to overwhelm the antimissile defenses—which is exactly what happened in Israel.”
Satellite images of a target on Tuesday—the Nevatim air base in southern Israel, home to its F-35 jet fighters—show that as many as 32 Iranian missiles managed to land within the base’s perimeter, according to analysis by professor Jeffrey Lewis, at the Middlebury Institute for International Studies in Monterey, Calif.
“Thirty-two missiles is a lot of missiles,” Lewis said. “We have exaggerated ideas about the effectiveness of air defenses. We have this pop-culture idea that missile defenses are much more effective or available than they actually are.”
While Israel operates the sophisticated Arrow 2 and Arrow 3 missile defense systems, co-produced with the U.S., the interceptors are limited in quantity and more expensive than the incoming Iranian missiles, Lewis said.
According to the Post, it often takes multiple interceptors to try stopping one ballistic target.
The paper said there haven’t yet been publicly available high-resolution images of Tel Nof air base, another main target Tuesday. 

Video footage from the area, it said, showed what appeared to be secondary explosions, suggesting that ammunition or air defenses there had been hit. 
At least one projectile also landed in northern Tel Aviv, outside the headquarters of Israeli intelligence agency Mossad.
Israel wasn’t releasing more details on the damage so as not to provide intelligence to its enemies, said military spokesman, Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani.
The Iranian armed forces’ general staff, meanwhile, has promised “widespread and comprehensive destruction” of infrastructure within the occupied territories should Iranian territory be attacked.  
According to the Post, it’s more complicated to inflict damage on a sprawling and hardened air base in the middle of the desert than to strike infrastructure sites in heavily populated areas. 
“The Israelis would care more about defending Tel Aviv” than defending Nevatim, said Lewis. “On the other hand, they would ultimately have the same problem there—Iranians could at the end of the day overwhelm the system.”