Israel’s critical failure in its war with Iran

The Bat Yam high-rise impacted by an Iranian missile, on 22 June 2025

Bar Peleg writes in Haaretz on 25 June 2025:

In an affluent neighborhood of Tel Aviv that took a direct missile hit a few days ago, a resident stood in the yard of her home picking up shards of glass and other debris. Still in shock from the night before, she told Haaretz about the devastating explosion.

The bomb shelter in her home is not up to code: It has wooden doors and is not in use. Had she been it when the missile landed, she might have been injured. Instead, each time the sirens sounded she went to a neighboring house, a long two-minute walk from her front door, with a shelter – if a narrow, concrete-lined tunnel with a few chairs inside can be called a shelter.

“When the missile hit, all the plaster fell from the ceiling,” she recalled, the fear still evident on her face even 10 hours after the impact. A two-minute walk from her home to her neighbors, day or night and sometimes several times a night. That was her life for about a week until the missile struck her neighborhood, after which she was moved into a hotel.

In Bat Yam a man named Ariel, whose home was destroyed, showed the niche at the entrance of the building that is designated as a shelter, a niche that in normal times stored an electrician’s equipment. In many places in central Israel, particularly in Tel Aviv, parking garages have been converted into shelters; some people slept in them every night to avoid being surprised by a missile or having to run from their home each time the sirens went off.

In the past 12 days, Israel demonstrated air and intelligence superiority deep inside a distant, hostile country, but the home front went into this war unprepared. As in the days following the terrible October 7 massacre, had it not been for a stable civil society and a strong ally, the results could have been much worse.

With each passing day Israel seemed to need more help from friends; from the United States in the form of supplying interceptor missiles and in interception itself; from Brothers and Sisters in Arms, Standing Together and additional civil-society organizations that the government disparages daily for the renovation, cleaning and maintenance of shelters. The attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities and military capabilities was the result of years of meticulous planning; we have been engaged in a terrible war for 20 months now and the shelters in the central region have not been renovated, nor have sufficient mobile shelters been set up in the country’s unrecognized Bedouin villages.

It wasn’t until last week, seven days into a war that some said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the defense establishment had planned for 20 years, that the government approved a 100-million-shekel ($29.5 million) plan to renovate existing public shelters and install portable shelters. We can only hope that before the next round with Iran, which everyone knows is coming, the money will be allocated and the shelters renovated. There are reasonable grounds to assume it will not.

Then there are those push notifications sent to cellphones, those horrifying messages that haunt Israelis in their sleep and that began to include Arabic, English and Russian translations only on Tuesday, the last day of the war. It seems the only ones who were prepared for the war were the orange helmets, the members of the Home Front Command rescue units who descended on every impact site and rescued those who needed help.

Tel Aviv suffered five direct hits; there were four each in Be’er Sheva and Haifa and two in Ramat Gan. In Tamra, four members of the same family were killed. Ten people – five from a single family, from Ukraine – were killed in Bat Yam; three were killed in Petah Tikva and two in Rishon Letzion. There were 52 impact sites across Israel. Most were hit by heavy missiles, some of them carrying cluster bombs.

Dozens of buildings were damaged; some of them will be razed within days. A senior military official said in a closed conversation after the cease-fire was announced that the reference scenario was much higher; the military had prepared for hundreds of fatalities and dozens of direct hits. This may be good for the operational summaries, but it is cold comfort to the families that were destroyed in an instant.

Despite the extraordinary efforts of the detection, warning and interception systems that demonstrated defensive as well as offensive aerial supremacy throughout the 627 days since the war in Gaza began, it once again became clear that the success is not 100 percent. Five hundred missiles fired from Iran caused the deaths of 29 people (including one from a heart attack). In comparison, during 625 days of war Hezbollah, Yemen, Hamas and Syria fired a total of 27,300 rockets and missiles that led to the death of about 40 civilians and the injury of an additional 3,200 – around 200 of whom are still hospitalized.

The homes of 10,000 Israelis were damaged, turning them into refugees, while many tens of thousands of Israelis suffered invisible wounds, in their souls; wounds that only they and their families feel. Some have praised the “civil resilience” of the home front, and rightfully. Some of the most effusive praise has come from officials who for years ignored reports and articles about the lack of protection. Some of them rebuked people who were injured for not having been in protected spaces when the missiles hit. It is doubtful any of these scolders ever had to run to a public shelter or a neighboring building with a frightened dog or crying children in the middle of the night.

The government, prime minister and other officials puff out their chests and talk about total victory, but throughout the country are people whose worlds have been turned upside down. And while most Israelis are slowly emerging from the suffocating feeling of the damp shelters, there are still 50 families that have not breathed for 627 days.

In these days, too, when elected officials failed to engage on the issue, many Israelis tried to remember and to remind others of those living in the depths of Gaza. Some did so with a post on social media, while a few brave souls ventured into the streets. There, they encountered police trying to suppress any spark of protest and democracy under a misinterpretation of emergency regulations, with aggressive removals of solitary protesters, strip searches and arrests. At times, it seemed that this was another “mission accomplished” of the military operation.

And despite the sirens, the beating of the drums of war and the disturbing screeches of the Home Front Command’s notifications, the country seemed almost still over the past 12 days. The roads were empty, many cafés were closed: not since the immediate aftermath of the massacre in the Gaza border area has there been such a feeling in much of the country. Some of the vibrant life moved underground, to shelters and parking garages, underground light-rail stations and protected areas.

A 12-day war ended Tuesday with impressive accomplishments, but a 627-day war continues unhindered. Over the past 12 days Israelis learned many lessons, one of which is that wars do end.

This article is reproduced in its entirety