Iranian missiles overwhelmed Israeli defenses at some sites, analysts say

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.

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.

Unlike April 13, when Iran fired a large number of slower 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," said Ulrich Kühn, head of research for arms control at the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy in Hamburg, Germany. “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. It often takes multiple interceptors to try stopping one ballistic target.

There haven’t yet been publicly available high-resolution images of Tel Nof air base, another main target Tuesday. Video footage from the area 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, hundreds of yards away from the headquarters of Israeli intelligence agency Mossad.

Iranian missiles have to travel about 550 miles to reach Israel and have proved to be relatively inaccurate at such long ranges. Images of Nevatim show that most missiles hit empty areas of the vast base, or roads. Only one appears to have struck a hangar, and it isn’t clear what it contained. Satellite images show no damage to aircraft.

The Israeli military said Nevatim is operating normally, with planes based there launching airstrikes across the region in recent days. “There were some hits in central Israel and some hits in southern Israel, including some hits on air force bases, but nothing that hurt our functionality, our operation levels. No aircraft, no people, no important capabilities were damaged," said Israeli military spokesman, Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani. Israel wasn’t releasing more details on the damage so as not to provide intelligence to its enemies, he said.

To save interceptors, Israel usually doesn’t target missiles headed for empty areas, so it isn’t clear how many missiles that hit Nevatim were deliberately ignored by air defenses.

The Israelis “are brilliant at prioritizing and protecting the things that have to be protected. They may have looked at [Nevatim] and said, ‘This is acceptable, I still have to prioritize Tel Aviv, I have to prioritize my critical infrastructure,’" said retired Gen. Tim Ray, who commanded the U.S. Air Force Global Strike Command. “There is no way to stop everything."

The Iranian barrage didn’t exact the sort of damage that would be commensurate with the resources expended, Ray said. “If I were to be the guy in charge of that strike, I would not be impressed with the results," he said. “While they did hit a few things—and that’s war—they didn’t truly degrade the Israelis. The Israelis were not deterred."

Israel hasn’t specified what kinds of targets it will seek within Iran, though Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pledged a heavy response. Iran billed its Tuesday attack as retaliation for Israel’s assassinations of the leaders of Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Palestinian Hamas, both U.S.-designated terrorist organizations.

The Iranian armed forces’ general staff, meanwhile, has promised “widespread and comprehensive destruction" of infrastructure within Israel should Iranian territory be attacked. Adm. Ali Fadavi, deputy commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, has pledged to hit Israeli power stations, gas fields and oil refineries, according to Iranian state media.

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."

Because of that, Iran’s arsenal of missiles and, even more important, its missile manufacturing capabilities, are likely to be among Israel’s priority targets, said Fabian Hinz, research fellow for defense and military analysis at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

The size of Iran’s—or, or for that matter, Israel’s—missile arsenals are national secrets. Gen. Kenneth McKenzie told a Senate hearing in 2022 when he was commander of the U.S. Central Command that Iran had over 3,000 ballistic missiles of various types, with some of them able to reach Israel, more than 550 miles away. Most of these missiles have shorter ranges, and were developed to target oil facilities and U.S. installations in the Gulf region.

While Iran’s missile stockpiles are in hardened underground facilities that are difficult to penetrate, its missile production plants are less protected, said Hinz. “They have a few very critical bottlenecks. These are exposed and you can target them relatively easily," he said. “Even quite limited strikes would have an impact—nothing you couldn’t repair, but something that would stop production for quite a while."

Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at Yaroslav.Trofimov@wsj.com.