Iran fired five missile salvos at Israel across roughly 18 hours from Sunday night through Monday afternoon. Air defences intercepted most incoming missiles. Debris reached residential areas — fragments fell near the Knesset and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and one person was burned by shrapnel in East Jerusalem.
The sustained tempo, rather than any single salvo, is the pressure. Arrow and David's Sling interceptors cost $2–3 million each. Israel's cabinet approved NIS 2.6 billion (~$826 million) in emergency defence procurement last week, days after Semafor reported the country was running critically low on ballistic missile interceptors. The IDF denied the shortage; Israel Hayom suggested the Semafor report was Iranian disinformation. But the procurement approval itself — the largest emergency defence spend since the war began — confirms the burn rate is a recognised problem at cabinet level, whatever the current inventory.
The warhead design compounds the cost. Since the IRGC announced its shift to payloads exceeding one tonne, Iran has paired heavy kinetic warheads with cluster submunitions — testing two failure modes simultaneously. Heavy warheads stress individual interceptors; cluster payloads ensure dispersed damage even when interception succeeds, as Friday's 11 confirmed impacts in central Israeli towns demonstrated. An IRGC spokesman stated Monday that most missiles fired so far were produced "a decade ago" and that weapons manufactured after the initial strikes remain unused1. If older inventory is already achieving residential-area impacts and forcing emergency procurement, the Kheibarshekan and Fattah hypersonic systems the IRGC claims to hold in reserve represent a capability ceiling Israel has not yet been asked to defend against.
The trajectory since Friday is an escalation in effect rather than volume: from the first confirmed impacts in central Israeli towns, to debris on the seat of government and Christianity's holiest church, to sustained multi-day bombardment that treats each salvo less as an attack than as an entry on a ledger — each one subtracting interceptors that cannot be replaced at the rate they are expended.
