Since the start of the conflict on February 28, 2026, Iranian missiles have struck several areas in Israel despite numerous interceptions. Reuters reported strikes in the center of the country on Tuesday, March 3, 2026, while its photo report from Sunday, March 2, 2026 had already shown that some salvos had escaped interception and caused casualties.
The strikes of 2026 prove neither the collapse of Israel’s defense nor its invulnerability. They mainly show that a very dense multilayered architecture can greatly reduce damage without guaranteeing the interception of every projectile, especially when the threat combines duration, volume, and a diversity of delivery systems.
What changed between 2024, 2025, and 2026
The Iranian attack of April 13, 2024 had already demonstrated the density of Israel’s defenses. Described as the first direct Iranian strike against Israel, most of the drones and missiles were intercepted with the help of the United States, the United Kingdom, and other regional partners, which limited visible damage on Israeli territory.
The episode of October 1, 2024 shifted the debate toward ballistic missiles. Israel said it had faced a salvo of more than 180 ballistic missiles, which brought the upper defensive layer back to the forefront and highlighted the role of interceptions against trajectories that are faster and more demanding than those associated with short-range rockets.
The sequence of June 2025 then showed that Iranian missiles could once again penetrate the system. On June 19, 2025, the Associated Press documented impacts on a major hospital in southern Israel as well as on residential areas, despite the existence of a highly sophisticated defensive network. At the same time, on June 13, 2025, a new open confrontation pitted Israeli strikes in Iran against Iranian retaliatory long-range missile attacks.
What distinguishes 2026 is less the simple existence of breakthroughs than their place within a logic of attrition. Tehran appears to be betting on endurance and on the ability to sustain strikes for weeks. It is this duration that changes the equation: the problem is no longer only succeeding in an interception at a given moment, but sustaining an expensive defensive tempo across multiple successive waves.
Why iron dome is not the core issue
Media coverage often reduces Israel’s defense to Iron Dome, a short-range defense system designed mainly to intercept rockets, drones, and other relatively nearby threats. In reality, Israel’s defense is organized in several layers, with Arrow, a family of high-altitude interceptors designed to defend against ballistic missiles, and David’s Sling, an intermediate system intended in particular to intercept certain ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, drones, and aircraft.
In other words, when facing Iranian ballistic missiles, the main issue is not Iron Dome alone. The central challenge concerns the coordination between Arrow, David’s Sling, and U.S. reinforcements occasionally deployed in the region. As early as April 2024, this architecture also included additional American capabilities against ballistic missiles, confirming that Israel does not treat this type of threat as a simple short-range defense problem.
This distinction matters because it changes the analysis of “breakthroughs.” When a ballistic missile gets through, it does not necessarily mean that a single system failed. It means that an entire chain of detection, classification, layer assignment, and engagement did not succeed in neutralizing a specific projectile under specific conditions. This represents a major difference between a media reading centered on a well-known system name and an operational reading centered on the architecture as a whole.
Why some strikes get through despite a very dense defense
The first explanation is volume. The larger a salvo is, the more the defense must simultaneously track a large number of trajectories, distinguish priority projectiles, and decide which interceptors to commit.
The second explanation is the diversity of delivery systems. Since 2024 and 2025, Iranian salvos have included a mixture of drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles. Such diversity complicates the allocation of defensive layers because flight profiles, speeds, and interception windows differ depending on the type of threat.
The third explanation is the actual geometry of engagement. Even within a dense architecture, detection timelines, approach angles, altitude, and the possibility of attempting a second interception vary from one projectile to another. The Center for Strategic and International Studies emphasizes the logic of operational experience accumulated by Israel since October 7, 2023, rather than the idea of theoretically perfect protection.
The fourth explanation is prioritization. The Israeli architecture is designed to distinguish projectiles threatening populated areas or critical infrastructure from those likely to fall in less critical areas. This means that some “breakthroughs” may result not from an absolute inability to intercept, but from defensive selection under constraints, even if, in practice, some projectiles with significant threat value have indeed reached Israeli territory.
The endurance battle: interceptor stocks and production pace
The current confrontation is not fought only in the sky. It is also fought in industrial supply chains.
Each interception requires a complex and expensive interceptor produced in limited quantities. After the Iranian attack of April 13, 2024, the Israeli defense industry accelerated production of these interceptors, a sign that the endurance issue had already been identified as a central concern.
The open war of 2025 made this problem more visible. Several analyses mentioned a possible strain on stocks of high-altitude interceptors, particularly if ballistic strikes continued for several weeks. The concern was not a rapid collapse of the defense, but rather a gradual pressure on a particularly costly and industrially demanding segment of the missile defense architecture.
The 2026 campaign gives this question even greater importance. Iranian strikes now appear to follow a logic of endurance, with repeated salvos intended to maintain pressure rather than achieve an immediate decisive effect.
In this type of confrontation, the tactical performance of interception systems alone is no longer enough to determine the balance. The decisive variable also becomes the ratio between interceptor consumption and stock replenishment.
The robustness of a modern missile defense system is therefore not measured only by the percentage of interceptions during a single night. It is also measured by the industrial capacity to sustain several weeks of operations, to prioritize the most serious threats, and to rapidly rebuild stocks of upper-layer interceptors, where each interception is far more expensive and involves rarer capabilities than short-range defense.
The Iranian strikes of 2026 reveal less a total failure than a more demanding reality: a multilayered defense can be highly effective without being impermeable. The episodes of April 2024 and October 2024 mainly illustrated the system’s absorption capacity. The sequence of June 2025 made the possibility of successful strikes more visible. The campaign of March 2026 adds a new dimension—an endurance war in which upper layers such as Arrow and the intermediate layer David’s Sling weigh more heavily than Iron Dome alone in countering Iranian ballistic missiles.
