Iran launched seven ballistic missiles at Israel early Thursday, wounding at least nine people across multiple cities and scattering cluster bomblets over civilian areas in Tel Aviv, Haifa, and northern Israel, the New York Post reported. The attack struck homes, destroyed cars, ignited fires, and blew apart a storefront, all while the regime in Tehran continues to absorb punishing strikes from both Israel and the United States.
The Times of Israel reported that seven salvos of ballistic missiles were detected over Israel and the West Bank Thursday morning. The second rocket slammed into Kafr Qasim, a city in central Israel, wounding five people. Another bomb landed in nearby Ganei Tikva, destroying several cars and sparking a large fire.
In Tel Aviv, a ballistic missile reportedly equipped with cluster munitions dropped bomblets over a wide area, wounding two people and destroying a storefront. Cluster bomblets also hit a shopping center in Haifa and struck locations across northern Israel, where shrapnel from an explosion left one more person injured, officials said.
The use of cluster munitions, weapons designed to scatter smaller bomblets across a broad radius, marks a particularly reckless escalation. These are not precision-guided strikes against military targets. They are area-effect weapons dropped on shopping centers, residential streets, and civilian vehicles. The fact that Tehran chose to arm its missiles with cluster warheads tells you everything about the regime's regard for human life.
The Samaria Regional Council said bombs hit two homes in West Bank settlements. Residents were spared only because they had taken shelter in safe rooms. Without those rooms, the casualty count would have been far worse.
That nine people were wounded, and not killed, is a function of Israeli preparedness, not Iranian restraint.
Thursday's attack was not an isolated provocation. Iran has fired more than 400 ballistic missiles at Israel since the start of the war. At least eight of those missiles have struck highly populated areas, causing extensive damage. Those hits alone have killed at least 15 people and wounded hundreds more.
The Israel Defense Forces maintains that its interception rate still stands at 92 percent for attacks aimed at populated areas and key infrastructure. That is an extraordinary number, but the missiles that get through carry devastating consequences. Thursday proved that again.
Israel has not absorbed this campaign passively. Its air force has dropped more than 13,000 bombs on Iran since the war began, targeting air defense and missile systems, weapons production sites, nuclear facilities, and military headquarters. The IDF estimates some 5,000 Iranian soldiers have been killed in those strikes.
The American military footprint in this campaign is enormous. Central Command chief Adm. Brad Cooper said Wednesday that the United States has hit more than 10,000 targets inside Iran, aimed at hindering the Islamic republic's ability to fire attacks outside its borders. That figure, delivered just hours before Thursday's missile barrage, underscores the scale of the combined effort to degrade Tehran's offensive capability.
And yet Iran still managed to put seven missiles over Israeli airspace in a single morning. The regime's stockpile is deep, its willingness to strike civilian areas is plain, and its tolerance for absorbing losses appears, for now, unbroken.
The Trump administration's posture toward Iran, deal or face devastating escalation, looks less like saber-rattling and more like a sober reading of the threat. Tehran has answered diplomacy with ballistic missiles. It has answered warnings with cluster bombs over Tel Aviv.
Those who spent years insisting that engagement and restraint would moderate the regime have some explaining to do. As one liberal New York Times columnist recently conceded, the pressure campaign against Iran is producing results, even if it makes certain Washington voices uncomfortable to admit it.
Consider the contrast. While Iran rains cluster munitions on Israeli civilians, former intelligence officials in Washington have spent the last several years urging Americans to take Tehran's word at face value. Former CIA Director John Brennan, for instance, publicly said he trusts Iran's word over the administration's when it comes to nuclear talks. That position looks worse with every missile that clears Iranian airspace.
Brennan's instinct to side with Tehran over his own government was never defensible on the merits. After Thursday, it is not defensible on the facts, either. The regime he vouched for just scattered submunitions over a shopping center in Haifa.
Several questions hang over Thursday's attack. No specific official source has been cited for the claim that the missiles carried cluster warheads, though the bomblet dispersal pattern across multiple cities is consistent with that assessment. The identities of the nine wounded have not been released. And the specific agency that detected the seven salvos has not been named.
What is clear: the combined weight of more than 13,000 Israeli bombs and more than 10,000 American strikes has degraded Iran's military capacity but has not stopped its ability to hit civilian targets. The 92 percent interception rate is remarkable. The 8 percent that gets through is lethal.
The White House warning that the administration would "unleash h***" on Iran if talks stalled was delivered before Thursday's attack. Tehran's response, apparently, was to launch seven missiles at Israeli cities loaded with cluster munitions.
At some point, the world will have to reckon with a simple fact: Iran is not a misunderstood negotiating partner. It is a regime that fires cluster bombs at shopping centers. Policy should start there.
