Israel is running out of anti-air/anti-missile interceptors, according to a report yesterday in the FT. “Israel’s munitions issue is serious,” said Dana Stroul, deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East from 2021 to 2023, now ensconced at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “If Iran responds to an Israel attack [with a massive air strike campaign], and Hizbollah joins in too, Israel air defenses will be stretched,” she said, adding that US stockpiles were not limitless. “The US can’t continue supplying Ukraine and Israel at the same pace. We are reaching a tipping point.”
Boaz Levy, chief executive of Israel Aerospace Industries, a state-owned company which makes the Arrow interceptors used to shoot down ballistic missiles, told FT that he was running triple shifts to keep production lines running. “Some of our lines are working 24 hours, seven days a week. Our goal is to meet all our obligations,” Levy said, adding that the time required to produce interceptor missiles was “not a matter of days.” While Israel does not disclose the size of its stockpiles, he added: “It is no secret that we need to replenish stocks.”
The situation looks to get worse before it might get better. The FT notes that Israel had less success fending off Iran’s October 1 attack than it did the April attack. Secondly, Hezbollah is still holding back its full capabilities. “We are not seeing Hizbollah’s full capability yet. It has only been firing at around a tenth of its estimated prewar launching capacity, a few hundred rockets a day instead of as many as 2,000,” said Assaf Orion, a former Israeli brigadier general and head of strategy at the Israel Defense Forces. “Some of that gap is a choice by Hizbollah not to go full out, and some of it is due to degradation by the IDF . . . But Hizbollah has enough left to mount a strong operation,” Orion added. “Haifa and northern Israel are still on the receiving end of rocket and drone attacks almost every day.”
