Among the hundreds of launches, several missiles carried a unique type of warhead – armed with cluster munitions
Iran has developed three types of cluster-munition missiles; the largest can carry up to 80 bomblets.
At least three of these missiles managed to penetrate Israel’s air defense system
At an altitude of about seven kilometers, the warhead breaks apart, releasing numerous submunitions – or bomblets. The wide dispersion radius triggered multiple alerts across the country
Each bomblet carries roughly seven kilograms of explosives, similar to a short-range Hamas rocket – and detonates upon impact.
One missile scattered bomblets across a 10-kilometer radius, striking Savyon, Or Yehuda, Azor, Holon, and Bat Yam
Another dispersed nine cluster munitions across Be’er Sheva, over a radius of approximately six kilometers
Normally, Iran and Hamas and Hezbollah claim that they are only aiming at military targets. The claim is ridiculous, but since it cannot usually be proven wrong, it often inoculates those parties from being accused definitively of war crimes if they can point to some military target in the general area.
But from this description of Iran's cluster bombs, it is clear that they cannot possibly have been aimed at military targets, since the bomblets spread over as much as 10 kilometers - by design.
Unlike most of Iran's ballistic missiles, which have an expected accuracy radius of between 5 and 100 meters, the cluster bomb missiles are designed to spread terror over a large area. They cannot be aimed at specific buildings.
The entire reason Iran designed them this way was because then the missiles disperse the bomblets at seven kilometers altitude, Israel's last line of defensive systems cannot possibly shoot them down.
Spreading the bomblets across wide swaths of heavily populated areas can only have one purpose: to target civilians.
We already know that Iran targeted the Soroka Hospital using an accurate missile when the hospital was
kilometers away from any military target. It did not "miss" a military target, it was aimed at a civilian target.
Combined with the knowledge of how these cluster bombs work, it becomes impossible for Iran to plausibly claim that it aimed at military targets only. Like Hamas, it uses its missiles to terrorize and target civilians, and it brags about it in Farsi - even claiming far more deaths than official figures.
When Israel clearly aims at military targets that are embedded under or with civilian objects, the media and human rights groups are quick to use terms like "targeting civilians" and "indiscriminate bombing." Yet the same groups bend over backwards to excuse Hamas and Iran when those groups claim to be targeting military.
But anyone with even a modicum of understanding how these missiles work know, beyond any doubt, that Hamas and Iran aims at civilians. Which is a war crime.
And no one is talking about Iranian war crimes.
Funny how that works.