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Israel’s Air Force issued an update on their progress in the war with Iran, claiming that they have dropped 12,000 bombs in Iran since the start of the war in over 8,500 separate strikes on Iranian regime targets, with 3,600 strikes in Tehran alone.
According to a senior IAF official: “In 18 days, we flew as much as we would in a year.”
IAF fighter jets have carried out 5,700 separate sorties, carrying out a total of 540 waves of strikes in central and western Iran, along with 50 waves in the east of the country, as the military assessed to have destroyed around 85% of Iran’s air defence and detection systems, while more than 300 targets related to Iran’s air defences, including missile launchers and radars.
Assessments of Iran’s air defence systems noted that 92% had been destroyed, the IDF stated, adding that only a handful of such systems remain, including some that are hidden and not in use, while around 80% of Iran’s older air defence systems and 80% of its radars had been destroyed by the IDF attacks.
Iran also has what the military describes as decentralised air defences, where missile launchers are connected to various optical systems, such as rudimentary cameras with artificial intelligence tracking software to track the Israeli aircraft, but some 75% of these systems had been destroyed, claimed the IDF, and military officials acknowledged they are much harder to locate than the advanced systems.
Additionally, the IDF claimed it had destroyed around 60% of Iran’s estimated 470 ballistic missile launchers, while some military estimates had put this number at 770%, but around 200 of the launchers were destroyed in the strikes, while another 80 were not considered to be operational after the IAF struck tunnel entrances to a subterranean facility where they were stored.
The IAF continues to hunt down the remaining 200 missile launchers to reduce the missile fire on Israel, while the military has also assessed that Iran still has hundreds of ballistic missiles that can reach Israel, noting that so far Iran had launched over 350 missiles at Israel, with the rate of fire slowing to 10-20 missiles a day in the past week, in waves of just one or two missiles at a time.
