Israel-Hezbollah war risk rises. Can Iron Dome be overrun?

On Thursday morning, Hezbollah said it launched 200 rockets into Israel — one of its largest attacks yet — following the Israeli assassination of one of the group’s senior commanders, further ramping up fears over a potential full-blown war between the two heavily armed adversaries.

The Iran-backed Lebanese militant group, which is designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S. and U.K., said it fired at 10 Israeli military sites using a “squadron of drones.” Israel’s military said that “numerous projectiles and suspicious aerial targets” breached its territory, many of which were intercepted, and that there were no casualties.

Hezbollah has launched thousands of rockets into Israel in the nearly nine months since the latter began its war against Palestinian militant group Hamas in Gaza on Oct. 7. The rockets fired from Lebanon have killed 18 Israeli soldiers and 10 civilians, Israel says, while Israeli shelling has killed some 300 Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon and around 80 civilians, according to a Reuters tally.

The relatively low number of Israeli casualties is thanks to the country’s Iron Dome, a mobile all-weather defense system designed to protect Israeli territory by launching guided missiles to intercept incoming rockets and other short-range threats in mid-air. It has a success rate of around 90%, according to the Israel Defense Forces. 

The system, which became fully operational in March 2011 and has been upgraded several times since, has “successfully prevented countless rockets from hitting Israeli communities,” Israel’s Defense Ministry says. Originally produced in Israel, the Iron Dome was developed by state-owned Rafael Advanced Defense Systems with U.S. backing — and Washington continues to provide funding for it today.

The Iron Dome also intercepts around 90% of the near-daily rocket attacks from Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza, the IDF claims. Israel’s war in Gaza has killed more than 37,000 people in the besieged strip, according to Palestinian health authorities, in a bloody offensive triggered by Hamas’ terror attack on Oct. 7 that killed roughly 1,200 people in Israel and took an additional 253 hostage, 116 of whom have been freed. 

But as Israel faces the prospect of a two-front war — with Hamas to its south and Hezbollah to its north — and with the reality that Hezbollah has an enormous arsenal of missiles and is estimated to have 10 times the military capability of Hamas, the question is: can the Iron Dome be overrun? 

An all-out war between Israel and Hezbollah would be devastating for both sides. Already, at least 150,000 residents of southern Lebanon and…