Muslim Rodents and Rockets

...“Hassan Nasrallah says Hezbollah has a two-part operational plan,” says Shimon Shapira. “One is rocket fire on Tel Aviv and two is conquest of the Galilee. I wondered what he meant by that—how is Hezbollah going to invade the Galilee, take hostages, capture villages, and overrun military installations? But we’re learning from what is happening now. Nasrallah means Hezbollah is going to penetrate Israel through tunnels.”

During the first two weeks of the Gaza conflict, Hamas landed at least two significant punches. In firing missiles at Ben Gurion Airport, Hamas convinced the Federal Aviation Authority and European air carriers to temporarily suspend flights to Israel. The fact that relatively primitive rockets falling far short of their targets are nonetheless capable of at least briefly severing an advanced Western democracy with a leading tech economy from the rest of the world is a psychological blow. But perhaps the even greater concern for Israeli officials is the revelation of Hamas’s extensive tunnel network.

Until Operation Protective Edge, it was generally assumed that Gaza’s tunnel system was simply a feeding tube for a community of 1.8 million people. With both the Egyptian and Israeli borders closed, as well as Israel’s naval blockade, goods entered Gaza mainly through the tunnels from Egypt. So did weapons, including missiles made or designed by Iran, which, as the last two weeks have shown, are capable of reaching any site in Israel. The tunnel economy flourished under former Egyptian president and Hamas sponsor Mohamed Morsi but has suffered under his successor, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who has won praise from Jerusalem for shutting down as many tunnels as he can find.

However, there is another system in Gaza as well, a network of attack tunnels that end not in Egypt but in Israel, where over the last two weeks Hamas commandos have attempted several terrorist operations.

“Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said that we are not under siege, we are imposing a siege,” says retired IDF officer Jonathan Halevi, now a senior researcher at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. “What he meant was that [Hamas] can use tunnels as a strategic weapon. If you multiply tunnels, you can use them to send hundreds of fighters into Israel and create havoc, totally under cover. According to Hamas, the tunnels have changed the balance of power.”

Israeli officials have expressed amazement at the extent of the tunnel network. “Food, accommodations, storage, resupply,” one astonished official told reporters last week. “Beneath Gaza,” he explained, there’s “another terror city.” That is, Hamas’s tunnel network is evidence of a military doctrine, both a countermeasure to Israel’s clear air superiority and an offensive capability that threatens to take ground combat inside Israel itself, targeting villages, cities, and civilians as well as soldiers. Israel perhaps should not have been surprised to discover the size and seriousness of Hamas’s tunnel network because they’ve seen something similar before, in the aftermath of the 2006 war with Hezbollah. And indeed it was Iran’s long arm in Lebanon that helped build Hamas’s tunnels.


“The spiritual father of Hamas’s tunnel system is Imad Mughniyeh,” says Shimon Shapira, a Hezbollah expert and senior research associate at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. Mughniyeh, assassinated in 2008 in an operation believed to have been conducted by the Israelis, is credited with directing Hezbollah’s 2006 war. He was the head of the organization’s external operations unit and responsible for countless terrorist attacks. He also served as liaison to the top Iranian leadership as well as other Iranian allies and assets, including Hamas. “Mughniyeh sent instructors to Gaza and took Hamas members to Iran,” Shapira explains.

While Hamas and Hezbollah’s tunnel technology, equipment, and funding are mostly Iranian, the knowledge and the doctrine date back to the earliest days of the Cold War.

“The North Koreans are the leading tunnel experts in the world,” says North Korea expert Bruce Bechtol. They learned as a matter of necessity. “The U.S. Air Force basically exhausted its target list after the first eight months of the Korean War,” Bechtol explains. “All the North Korean cities were turned to rubble, so they got good at building large tunnels and bunkers, some of them 10 or 11 square miles. In effect, the North Koreans moved their cities underground for three years, with hundreds of thousands of people living down there.”

“There is no better protection than the earth,” says David Maxwell, associate director of the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University. But Pyongyang also has an offensive doctrine. “Defectors tell us that the North Koreans built 21 tunnels under the demilitarized zone, but only 4 have been discovered,” says Maxwell, a retired U.S. Army colonel who served in South Korea. “Our concern is that the North Koreans would infiltrate, sending thousands of men through the tunnels in an hour, maybe dressed in South Korean uniforms. You can’t imagine the kind of havoc that would wreak.”

Just last week Hamas tried the same tactic, sending commando units disguised as IDF troops through two tunnels. For a short time, they fooled real Israeli soldiers in an observation post.

It’s nothing new for the North Koreans to work with terrorist groups, as Bechtol explains. It started with the Polisario, the North African, and at one time Soviet-funded, terrorist group fighting the Moroccan government. “The North Koreans built them underground facilities, command and control, hospitals,” says Bechtol. “All of it was supported by Soviets, but that changed with the end of the Cold War, when the North Koreans offered their services on a cash and carry basis only.”

Their top customer is the Islamic Republic of Iran. The North Koreans, Bechtol says, have helped build some of the Iranians’ underground nuclear weapons facilities, as well as Hezbollah’s underground network. “They built it in 2003-04, coming into Lebanon disguised as houseboys serving the Iranians. Maybe nobody asked, hey, how come these houseboys are speaking Korean?”

The significance of the tunnels became clear in the 2006 war, as Bechtol explains. “It lowered Hezbollah’s casualty rate. The Israelis wondered why the air force was not inflicting more damage and it was because of those tunnels. It was the first time Hezbollah was ever truly protected.”

Last week a U.S. federal judge ruled that North Korea and Iran were liable for providing support to Hezbollah during the 2006 war. According to U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, North Korea and Iran assisted “in building a massive network of underground military installations, tunnels, bunkers, depots and storage facilities in southern Lebanon.” Lamberth noted that one Hezbollah commander who received training in North Korea was Mustafa Badreddine, Mughniyeh’s cousin. And as with North Korea, Hezbollah’s heavily reinforced underground network has also given rise to an offensive doctrine—to invade northern Israel.

“Hassan Nasrallah says Hezbollah has a two-part operational plan,” says Shimon Shapira. “One is rocket fire on Tel Aviv and two is conquest of the Galilee. I wondered what he meant by that—how is Hezbollah going to invade the Galilee, take hostages, capture villages, and overrun military installations? But we’re learning from what is happening now. Nasrallah means Hezbollah is going to penetrate Israel through tunnels.”

The difference between Hamas’s underground network and Hezbollah’s, explain experts, is the topography. It’s easier to dig tunnels in the Gaza sand than in the rocky pastures and rich soil of the Galilee. The catch is that the latter are also harder to destroy since they are further fortified by nature.

Several Israeli journalists are reporting that “the fiasco of the tunnels,” as Yossi Melman calls it, might have been avoided. Either military and security officials were aware of the extent of Hamas’s network and didn’t do enough about it, or they ran up against bureaucratic roadblocks. Whether the IDF needs to detail a specific unit to monitor and uproot the tunnels that cross into Israel on its southern and northern borders, one fact is plain: For decades Israel’s traditional military doctrine has been to fight its enemies on the other side of the wire. However, its enemies’ new North Korean-inspired doctrine is to go under the wire. If Israel doesn’t deal with first Hamas’s tunnels and then Hezbollah’s, the next war it faces may well be inside Israel itself.

Our Iron Dome worth its weight in 24 kt Gold

An Iron Dome launcher in Ashdod firing an interceptor rocket on July 9, 2014. Photo by Reuters

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The Iron Dome system for intercepting enemy missiles and rockets was being hailed as a hero in 2012’s Operation Pillar of Defense. Now, during Operation Protective Edge, its achievements have been even greater. It is hard to imagine the damage and loss of life that would have occurred in Israel without Iron Dome, which has shot down over 900 rockets so far. The 90% interception rate, a slight improvement over its 85% rate in Pillar of Defense, has allowed the home front to keep to a nearly normal routine under fire, buying time for the army to continue with the operation.

Not only has the Iron Dome battery been a remarkable technological achievement, it was developed in just two years and is unusually cost-effective for such a sophisticated, multifacted system.

But it has not been a financial success for Israel’s defense industry, which developed it. For now, they have only one customer: the Israel Defense Forces. A few governments have expressed interest but, for now at least, no other country in the world faces the same immediate missile threat that Israel does.

The main contractor for Iron Dome is state-owned Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, in collaboration with the Defense Ministry’s Administration for the Development of Weapons and Technological Infrastructure (known as Mafat in Hebrew).

Other contractors involved in the project are Elta Systems – a subsidiary of state-owned Israel Aerospace Industries – which makes the radar system; mPrest Systems, 50%-owned by Rafael and the developer of the command and control system; and Comtec Communications, which developed components for radio communications. The Israel Air Force’s Air Defense Command operates the batteries.

Since Pillar of Defense, the system has been improved and adapted, based on the new threats and types of rockets facing Israel, taking into account the lessons learned from previous battles. There are now nine operational batteries, compared with only five during Pillar of Defense, though the last two were put into operation only after the most recent escalation with Hamas.

“The development of the Iron Dome system is continuous. It is better than its predecessors. We’re staying one step ahead of the other side, which has introduced additional missile systems – not just the M75, but also other new systems,” says Mafat’s Yair Ramati.

One of the fundamental goals in developing Iron Dome was to make it efficient and low-cost. “If you take out the cost of the radar – the most expensive component of the system – the cost of each additional battery is relatively marginal. After that, you can decide how many rockets to intercept and to control costs. It’s not an expense on a level that a country needs to think about,” says mPrest CEO Natan Barak, a colonel in the reserves and commander of the navy’s software unit during Pillar of Defense.

The savings are also expressed in limited manpower needed to operate the system, as well as in operational flexibility. For instance, the system only defends school buildings when they are in use, cutting down the number of interceptor missiles that need to be launched. Each interceptor costs a few tens of thousands of dollars.

“We were asked to develop a very inexpensive system,” explains the head of the project at Rafael, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “We invested a lot of money in developing the interceptor and the system in general. We did some very smart things, and we sought very reliable components and systems. We also used a few innovations of our own that have kept costs down.”

This week, the Defense Ministry ordered the companies involved in Iron Dome not to give interviews or speak to the public for now. “The Iron Dome system has many hundreds of successful interceptions behind it. Since it became operational, many improvements have been made and are being made, which brought about significant improvements in its capabilities. Beyond that, for obvious reasons, we cannot provide details,” a spokesman said.

Nevertheless, a lot is known about how Iron Dome works from previous interviews conducted by The Marker.

The radar, developed by Elta, is an active, electronically scanned array radar that scans the sky for a ballistic motor or rocket. When it detects any, it tracks the rocket’s location and determines its type. This data is transferred to the command and control system, developed by mPrest, which processes and assesses the level of threat and the rocket’s projected target.

If it’s determined that the rocket is going to fall outside a protected area – meaning one that is largely unpopulated and/or of no strategic importance – it won’t be intercepted. If it is, the decision is made that it will be intercepted.

The launcher, which includes up to 20 Tamir interceptor missiles made by Rafael, is operated by the Air Defense Command in the field. An interceptor can act independently and complete its mission, even if it loses communication with the ground, thanks to its sighting systems. The battery also has a communication center that connects all the launchers and interceptors in the region.

The brain of Iron Dome is the command and control center, which synchronizes data from the radar system and other sensors, and decides which targets to intercept.

“The moment we see that the threat is going to reach a protected area, we build the interception plans,” said mPrest’s Barak in an interview with TheMarker during Pillar of Defense. “We construct hundreds of solutions and choose the best one. Then we launch the interceptor at the right time so it will meet the threat in the right place. We need to be able to tell whether it’s one threat or several. There’s a program to match each threat, and we confirm that the interceptor is carrying out the program we expected. If there’s a change in the data, the interceptor gets an update, which is how the interceptor meets the target.”

There are many constraints, because Iron Dome operates in a civilian environment and in areas where aircraft are present.

“These factors make interception relatively complex,” explained Barak. “At short ranges, which are the hardest for us, the reaction time from the moment of detection and the moment we know the rocket is going to fall in a protected area, has to be less than a second. We have less than a second to launch an interceptor.”

And if there’s more than one threat? “We have to launch more than one interceptor.”

The batteries are coordinated at the field-commander level. Each of the batteries is independent, though they communicate with each other. If one goes down, the others can fill in, but that scenario is unlikely. “The systems have extraordinary backup,” he said. “It’s rare for a system not to be in complete working order.”

Iron Dome isn’t influenced by weather conditions. And good news for residents of Tel Aviv and farther north: the greater the distance, the better the interception ability.

“The more time we have, the greater the precision,” says Barak. “So Gush Dan [the central region where Tel Aviv is located] can be less afraid. Of course, many parameters must be considered, but in terms of this particular aspect, Gush Dan is easier for us than Sderot.”

Iron Dome uses a very sophisticated algorithm to plan the interceptor’s path, says Rafael. Once the operator presses “confirm,” the system does the optimization and decides when to launch the interceptor. After the launch, the interceptor receives ongoing updates about the target’s location, which it uses to tweak its trajectory so it can reach the optimal interception point.

One of the considerations is whether to intercept the target inside a protected area. Even if the interception can only be done over a populated area, aerial interception is still considered the better alternative. If the target lands in a protected area, there will be a lot more damage than if it is intercepted and a piece of metal falls that can’t cause as much damage.

“Our goal is to reduce the loss of life, to improve the home front’s ability to withstand [the rockets], and we build our forces to that purpose. We understand that with selective, personal warning, we will limit the number of casualties and the amount of damage of the rockets,” said Lt. Col. Gil – whose last name cannot be published – the head of the command, control, communications and warning department in the IDF. “So, if we measure the number of injuries per rocket, we’ve seen a reduction since the Second Lebanon War [in 2006]. Also in the measurement of damage to the economy, which cost hundreds of millions of shekels a day during the war, the goal is to reach a level of a tenth of that, and even less.”

Gil explains that there are a number of sensors, and not just the Iron Dome radar, that identify a rocket launched at Israel. All the information from these sensors is collected by a single system operated by the air force, which then draws a prediction of an elliptical area where the missile is expected to land. The farther and longer the missile flies, the smaller the ellipse. This information is then passed onto a second command and control network belonging to the Home Front Command. This system maps the ellipse onto what are called “polygons,” 235 of which cover the entire country. The IDF then alerts the residents of the relevant “polygon” areas where the missile is forecast to fall – and only them.

That marks a great improvement in fine-tuning threats so as few people as necessary take shelter and disrupt their routine. Israel used to be divided into only 10 regions for missile-warning alerts, and as recently as a year and a half ago there were just 147 regions, said Gil.

This feature will eventually be enhanced by the 388 million shekel ($113.8 million) National Message system – a major Home Front Command project being developed to provide area-specific rocket warnings to civilians by cellphone and other means, not only via sirens. Only parts of the system are complete and operational. The goal is to provide alerts to people in a specific polygon of an impending attack, although it will be possible to also receive warnings of other areas, such as where a user’s parents or children are.