Transcription
There is a base in the NEV desert in southern Israel that the Israeli Air Force considers the single most important piece of military real estate in the country. It sits 15 km east of Beersa, 12 km north of Deona, and it covers 50 square kilmters of hardened concrete, buried fuel lines, reinforced hangers and runways designed to operate even under the most extreme conditions of sustained warfare. Its name is Neatim.
And right now, in the seventh day of the most dangerous regional war the Middle East has seen since 1973, Iran has been firing ballistic missiles at that base with a persistence, a precision, and a rate of learning that should be alarming every defense analyst, every strategic planner, and every person who thought the Abraham Accords and the Iron Dome and American air power had made Israel permanently untouchable from above.
Because the story of what Iran has been doing to Neatim, not just this week, but across an entire systematic campaign stretching back to April 2024, is not the story the Israeli military wants the world to see. It is not the story the American defense establishment has fully reckoned with. And it is not the story that gets communicated through the headline that says, "Missiles intercepted, no major damage."
The real story is deeper, more alarming, and more consequential than any single news cycle. So pay close attention because the technical details here matter as much as the political ones. And understanding them tells you something profound about where this war is heading and whether the air defense architecture that Israel and America have spent decades and billions of dollars building is actually adequate to the threat it now faces.
Let us start with what Nevatim actually is because you cannot understand why Iran keeps targeting it specifically without understanding what lies inside its hangers. Nevatim air base formally designated air force base 28 hosts the entire core of Israel's fifth generation air warfare capability. It is home to three complete squadrons of F-35i Aadier stealth fighter jets: the 140th Golden Eagle Squadron, the 116th Flying Wing Squadron, and the 117th First Jet Squadron.
These are not ordinary aircraft. The F-35 IADER is Israel's most advanced, most capable, and most strategically significant aircraft: a fifth generation stealth multi-roll fighter that is the backbone of Israel's ability to strike targets deep inside Iranian territory without being detected by air defense radar systems. Every single strike that Israel has launched against Iranian nuclear facilities, every precision attack on IRGC commanders, every mission deep into Iranian airspace has been conducted using aircraft that fly out of Nevatim.
Beyond the F-35 fleet, the base also houses C130J Super Hercules and Hercules transport aircraft, Boeing 707 aerial refueling tankers that allow Israeli jets to extend their range far beyond Israel's borders, electronic intelligence and reconnaissance aircraft, and in a detail that carries nuclear weight, potentially modified versions of those F-35s certified to carry the B-6112 tactical nuclear gravity bomb, after the United States Air Force announced in early 2024 that its own F-35s had been cleared for nuclear weapons delivery.
If any single location in the entire state of Israel represents the convergence of conventional and nuclear strike capability, it is neatim and that is precisely why it has been at the top of the IRGC's target list for nearly 2 years.
Now, let us trace what Iran has actually done to that base, operation by operation, because the arc of this campaign tells a story that is far more sophisticated than any single strike.
The first time Iran directly attacked Israel was on April 13th, 2024, Operation True Promise 1. Iran launched approximately 350 projectiles toward Israel in what was the largest attempted drone strike in recorded history: 170 drones, 30 cruise missiles, and 120 ballistic missiles. The primary designated target was Navatim.
What happened? Israel, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Jordan combined to shoot down 99% of the incoming weapons before they reached Israeli airspace. A US official confirmed that five Iranian ballistic missiles struck Nevatim, damaging a C130 transport aircraft, an unused runway, and some empty storage facilities. The base remained fully operational. The economist described it as militarily a flop, and Israeli defense officials took cameras to the base, pointed to a single small crater in the ground near an unfinished concrete structure, and said to journalists, "The Islamic Republic is lying. All the money that Iran spent on this attack resulted only in this pit." Israel was triumphant. The narrative was set. Iranian missiles cannot penetrate Israeli defenses. Iran cannot touch Nevatim.
But Iranian strategists were watching and they were learning and they were not done.
On October 1st, 2024, Iran launched Operation True Promise 2. Approximately 200 ballistic missiles in at least two waves, the largest direct attack on Israeli territory in the history of the conflict. This time, something fundamentally different happened. A Washington Post video analysis confirmed that at least two dozen Iranian missiles broke through Israel's air defenses and struck or landed directly at military and intelligence targets. Satellite imagery from Planet Labs analyzed by Decker Eve, a strategic forces analyst at the Center for Naval Analyses, a respected nonprofit research organization, identified at least 33 likely impact craters at Nevatim, with cloud cover likely obscuring additional strikes, putting the probable total closer to 40.
One missile punched a large hole through the roof of an aircraft hanger near the southern runway. Another struck directly on a taxiway. A support building at the southern end of the base was partially destroyed. A building on the eastern side showed signs of heavy structural damage. There were multiple closely grouped impacts around aircraft storage areas. Three additional ballistic missiles struck Telnoff air base, the facility in central Israel that is widely believed to store Israel's nuclear weapons, with at least one impact producing secondary explosions consistent with stored munitions detonating.
The IDF released a statement acknowledging damage to office buildings and maintenance areas, insisting no aircraft were hit. But Israel also appeared to deploy digital cloud coverage, deliberate satellite imagery obstruction over both Nevatim and Telnoff bases to prevent independent analysts from fully assessing the damage.
NPR's technical analysis, based on an interview with James Lewis, director of the strategic technologies program at the center for strategic and international studies, raised a possibility that should have sent alarm bells through every defense ministry in the world. Israel, Lewis concluded, likely made a deliberate decision not to fully defend Neatim in October 2024. The reason it simply did not have enough A2 and A3 interceptors to defend both its most critical air base and its major population centers simultaneously. In his words, quote, "The Iranians have succeeded in overwhelming the system, and the Israelis have had to pick and choose. They did not look like they were trying to defend this base."
Read that again. The most sophisticated missile defense architecture ever built, backed by the full technological and financial weight of the United States military industrial complex with Arrow 2, Arrow 3, David Sling, Iron Dome, and US Navy destroyers all operating simultaneously. And Iran had fired enough missiles in a sophisticated enough pattern that Israel was forced to make a choice: Defend Nevatim or defend Tel Aviv. They chose Tel Aviv. They left their Crown Jewel air base to absorb whatever Iran could get through.
Between April 2024 and October 2024, Iran's hit rate at Neatim went from approximately five missiles reaching the target out of 350 launched, a rate of roughly 1.5%, to between 20 and 40 missiles striking the base out of approximately 200 launched, a penetration rate approaching 20%. In 6 months, Iran had increased its ability to hit this specific target by more than 10 times. The learning curve was not gradual. It was a step change.
And military analysts who reviewed Iran's October 2024 targeting approach observed something critically important. The Iranians were not just firing more missiles. They were using different missiles. They were sequencing launches across multiple weapon types: drones with eight-hour flight times, cruise missiles with two and a half hour flight times, and ballistic missiles with 12-minute flight times. All timed to arrive at Neatim simultaneously within seconds of each other to saturate the defensive window and force the arrow system to engage multiple threats concurrently. That is not improvisation. That is deliberate operational learning refined across multiple attacks executed with an understanding of the physics and logistics of air defense that few observers had credited the IRGC with possessing.
Then came June 2025, the 12-day war. Israel initiated that conflict with a surprise assault on Iranian military and nuclear facilities, killing several IRGC commanders and at least 10 leading nuclear scientists. Iran retaliated with over 550 ballistic missiles and more than a thousand suicide drones. This time, six missiles directly impacted five military and intelligence facilities inside Israel, including Telnof Air Base and Camp Glyot, the main base of Israel's elite signals intelligence unit 8200. A telegraph analysis using radar data from Oregon State University's satellite monitoring network described several of these impacts as hitting their targets with what it called remarkable accuracy.
And then came the warning that should have frozen the debate about whether this conflict was manageable. The Wall Street Journal reported that in the final days of the 12-day war, Israel's inventory of defensive missiles was depleting, not strained. Depleting. The AOS system, the only layer of the defense architecture capable of intercepting Iran's medium and long range ballistic missiles, was running low on interceptors. That is why the ceasefire was agreed under US pressure on June 24th, 2025, not because the military objectives had been achieved, because the defense stockpile was running out. Iran had learned exactly how to make that happen. And in the process, it had increased its missile strike success rate from 8% to 16% over the course of that 12-day conflict, doubling its penetration rate within a single engagement.
Now we are in the current war. Operation True Promise of Four. February 28th, 2026. The United States and Israel launch what Defense Secretary Pete Hgsth calls the most lethal, most complex, most precision aerial operation in history. Iran names its response after the same tradition of its three previous operations and immediately begins targeting Nevatim again.
In the opening hours of the Iranian retaliation, the IRGC launched approximately 162 ballistic missiles directly at Israel, 39% of its total initial barrage, while simultaneously firing 167 missiles at the United Arab Emirates and 46 at Qatar. Iran also expanded targeting to maritime traffic, launching attacks against commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf. Iranian forces targeted Telnof air base, the military headquarters, and a large defense industry complex in Tel Aviv.
According to IRGC statements broadcast by IRB, Iran's state media, in successive waves, Iran announced at least eight separate waves of operation in the first 6 days. The IRGC used missiles and drones in combinations that forced Israel's air defense network to engage on multiple axes simultaneously across nine different countries, while Israeli interceptors were simultaneously being consumed defending Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Jordan, and Israel proper.
The depletion mathematics are devastating. General Dan Kaine, the top US military officer, confirmed on March 2nd that the United States alone had intercepted hundreds of Iranian ballistic missiles targeting American forces and its regional partners since the start of the war. Those intercepts, Kane acknowledged, are a success in tactical terms. They prevented missiles from striking their targets, but they come at the cost of pricey, high techch interceptors that are in critically short supply.
An anonymous senior US defense official speaking to the Inquirer Global Nation said, "The questions being asked in the Pentagon right now are not about whether the intercepts are working. The intercepts are working. The questions are about how long the stock piles last in a war that the president himself has said could continue for weeks and possibly far longer."
The critical threats analysis from the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for the Study of War, published on March 3rd, 2026, identified the central design logic of the combined USIsraeli campaign as an attempt to destroy Iran's ballistic missile launchers fast enough to prevent depleting the interceptor supply. The IDF confirmed it had destroyed 300 Iranian missile launchers since the start of the war, consistent with Israeli media reports of a 70% drop in Iranian missile fire toward Israel.
But that number contains within it a profound irony. The 70% reduction in Iranian missile launches is being celebrated as proof that the campaign is working. And it is working in the narrow sense that fewer missiles are being launched at Israel per day than in the first two days of the war. But the interceptors consumed to achieve that 70% reduction represent inventory that cannot be quickly replaced. The manufacturing capacity for Aero2 and A3 interceptors is limited. The supply chain for the components involves rare earth materials that China, which has now restricted their export for military use, controls. And every interceptor fired at an Iranian ballistic missile in this war is an interceptor that is not available for the next war or the next escalation or the next operation that Iran launches once this phase of the conflict reaches whatever negotiated or exhausted endpoint it eventually finds.
The technical picture that emerges from this 2-year campaign against Nevatim specifically reveals something that the Israeli military and the American defense establishment have not been fully honest with the public about. The Aero defense system, for all its genuine technological sophistication, was designed and sized for a threat environment that is fundamentally different from what Iran has now demonstrated it can field. Arrow3 exo atmospheric intercepts, the most capable layer of the defense, consumed between 60 and 70% of available rounds in the October 2024 engagement alone. Iran's newer missiles, including the Koramshar 4 variant and the FATA series, incorporate what defense engineers call maneuvering re-entry vehicles: warheads that deviate from predictable parabolic flight paths in the final seconds before impact, performing lateral accelerations that reduce the A3's hit tokill probability from approximately 89% in midcourse interception to somewhere between 65 and 70% at lower altitudes.
Israel Aerospace Industries CEO Boaz Levy acknowledged in December 2025 that the Aero4 program, the next generation interceptor designed specifically to counter these maneuvering warheads, approaches serial production with live trials accelerating based on lessons learned from the April and October 2024 direct strikes. But Arow4 is not yet deployed, and the war is happening right now, fought with Arow 2 and Arow3 stocks that are already under severe pressure.
Meanwhile, what has been happening to Telnof, the second Israeli base that Iran has targeted in every single one of these operations, raises questions that the Israeli government has never publicly answered and the international media has never pressed with sufficient force. Telnof air base in central Israel is widely believed, based on decades of open-source intelligence analysis, satellite imagery review, and the work of institutions including the Federation of American Scientists and the Natural Resources Defense Council, to be one of the primary storage sites for Israel's nuclear weapons. The specific concern is not that Israel admits this. It does not, maintaining its posture of nuclear ambiguity, but that multiple secondary explosions observed at Telnof during the October 2024 strikes, described by analysts as most likely from stored munitions, raise questions about what exactly was stored in the specific buildings that were struck.
In Operation True Promise 3, during the 12-day war of June 2025, Iran again targeted Telnof with documented accuracy, described by the Telegraph's satellite data analysis as striking with remarkable precision. And in the current operation True Promise I4, Iran's IRGC has again explicitly named Telnof as a priority target in its targeting announcements alongside the military headquarters in Tel Aviv and a large defense industry complex.
The Nevatim base commander, identified only as Brigadier General D, gave an interview this week published by WET News on March 3rd in which he described an encounter that captures both the Israeli Air Force's current dominance and the deeper vulnerability hiding beneath it. He described the moment an F-35I Adir shot down an Iranian Yak 130 fighter jet over Tyrron: the first downing of an enemy manned aircraft by Israel since 1985 and the first ever air-to-air kill by an F-35 in combat anywhere in the world. He said there are dozens of Israeli aircraft over Iranian territory at any given moment, that Israel's air superiority is total, and that Iran's air force understands it is inferior and threatened.
All of that may be true, but the base from which those F-35s operate has now absorbed Iranian ballistic missile strikes in four separate operations over 2 years. And the defense system protecting that base has, by the honest testimony of independent analysts and the implicit logic of the ceasefire that ended the 12-day war, already been stretched to its operational limits once before.
Israel's military chief of staff, General Isel Zamir, stated this week that Israel has destroyed 80% of Iran's air defenses and at least 60% of its ability to launch missiles. Those numbers, if accurate, are militarily significant, but they leave intact 40% of Iranian missile capability. And Iranian missiles, as the past 2 years have proven with satellite verified certainty, can reach NAVA team. They can penetrate the defense architecture when fired in sufficient numbers in sufficiently sophisticated sequences. And the interceptors being consumed to stop them are not being replaced at anything close to the rate they are being used.
At least 40 buildings in Tel Aviv were damaged in Iranian strikes on February 28th alone. A woman in the Tel Aviv area died from wounds sustained in an Iranian ballistic missile attack. A ninestory residential building in northern Israel was struck. Hifa was hit. Strikes continued reaching Israeli territory on March 3rd with CNN teams on the ground confirming what appeared to be a cluster warhead deployment above central Israel.
The arc of this entire campaign tells a story that cuts directly against the triumphalist narrative that has accompanied every Israeli and American military announcement. The narrative says, "Our technology is superior. Our pilots are the best in the world. Our air defenses have no equal. Operation Epic Fury is the most lethal precision aerial operation in history." All of that may be technically accurate. And yet, simultaneously, undeniably documented in satellite imagery and independent technical analysis, Iran has been hitting Nevatim with increasing accuracy in every successive operation since April 2024: from five missiles reaching the target in April 2024 to potentially 40 in October 2024, to documented hits on Telnoff and Unit 8200 in June 2025, to the ongoing operation True Promise I4 in which Iran is firing 162 ballistic missiles at Israel in a single barrage while simultaneously attacking nine other countries and threatening the world's most important energy waterway.
The learning curve runs in only one direction. And the interceptor stockpile runs in only one direction, too. And those two trajectories, Iran's improving accuracy and Israel's depleting defenses, are on a collision course that no military press conference is going to resolve.
The question this war has not yet answered, and the question that will determine whether this conflict ends in a negotiated pause or a catastrophic escalation, is this: What happens to the strategic balance in the Middle East if Iran succeeds in destroying or even seriously degrading the Nevatim fleet of F35s? What happens if Nevatim's runway infrastructure becomes nonoperational? What happens if Telnoff is struck with the kind of accuracy that produces not secondary explosions from stored conventional munitions, but something far worse?
These are not hypothetical questions designed to generate anxiety. They are the questions that the people operating these weapons systems ask themselves every single day. The answers to them are not public. But the trajectory of two years of Iranian strikes on Israel's most important base, tracked in satellite imagery, analyzed by independent defense researchers, and confirmed in the operational record of four separate escalation cycles, makes them questions that demand to be asked loudly, publicly, and without the comfortable reassurance that technological superiority automatically equals strategic security.
Share this story with the people in your life who are following this war. Because the version of events they are hearing from military spokespeople and government press releases is a version that measures success in intercepted missiles and destroyed launchers. The version that is harder to find, but more important to understand, is the version measured in depleted interceptor stockpiles, in hangers with holes in their roofs, in secondary explosions at a nuclear weapon storage facility, and in an Iranian missile program that has doubled its penetration rate in a single 12-day engagement, and that has been learning, adapting, and improving with every single exchange of fire for two consecutive years.
The most important air base in Israel has been targeted in every single Iranian operation since April 2024. That is not a coincidence. It is a strategy. And the strategy is working better, not worse, with every