How and why did Hezbollah manage to hit Ramat Gan in Israel on Monday night?

And why while the IDF first said they shot down the Hezbollah ballistic missile, the police contradicted them and later the military sent a modified message that showed both the IDF and the police were right?

Shortly before 9pm on Monday, Hezbollah fired a ballistic missile into the Tel Aviv area.

The Iron Dome is generally not capable of shooting down ballistic missiles because of their speed and different trajectory than Hezbollah’s cheaper missiles.

Alternatively, the David’s Sling and the Arrow 2 and 3 missile defense systems are each capable of shooting down different types of ballistic missiles, with the David’s Sling focused on medium-range missiles and the Arrow systems capable of shooting down longer-range missiles in the atmosphere.

The IDF fired interceptor missiles to destroy the ballistic missile, striking it about 12 kilometers high in the sky. So the military was right when it said it hit Hezbollah’s missile.

The IDF shot down the rocket

However, he also said that some shrapnel from the rocket then landed in Ramat Gan, causing some damage. That wasn’t quite right.

Police at the scene saw a large portion of the ballistic missile land in Ramat Gan on a bus, causing an explosion and fires and injuring people nearby, so they concluded that it had not been shot down. He was, therefore, partly right. What happened was that the Israeli interceptor missile hit the ballistic missile, but for reasons being considered, it did not detonate as planned.

Instead, a small part of the projectile exploded, but a larger part simply detached from the rest, causing it to fall relatively straight down at high speed from the 12 km drop point.

The fact that so much of the projectile remained intact was part of why the damage was so much greater than usual, and greater than it would have been if what had fallen from the sky had been “just” smaller pieces of shrapnel.

On the other side of the coin, because the ballistic missile was cut in half, it also did not have the full devastating effect it would have had it not been shot down at all.

Overall, the IDF would like to present this incident broadly as a success because the rocket was hit.

But as more people are killed or injured, and this happens deeper and deeper inside the country’s borders, questions intensify about how long and how well air defense systems can protect the public.