by Andrew Bernard, Vita Fellig
“The fact that Iran is knowingly firing inaccurate ballistic missiles at cities gives you a good idea of where their intentions lie,” Ryan Brobst, of FDD, told JNS.
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| Smoke rises from the scene where a ballistic missile fired from Iran hit and caused damage at the Soroka Medical Center in Beersheva, Israel, on June 19, 2025. Photo by Dudu Greenspan/Flash90. |
The Iranian regime is being widely accused of war crimes after it fired a missile at Soroka Medical Center in Beersheva, in southern Israel, on Thursday, with many noting a double standard, in which Israel is decried for pursuing terror sites embedded intentionally in Gazan hospitals, but global organizations have yet to condemn Iran.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at the hospital that “we are hitting nuclear targets and missile targets precisely, and they are hitting the pediatric ward of the hospital. That says it all.” On a visit to the hospital, Israeli President Isaac Herzog called the attack “a war crime.”
“Iran is indiscriminately targeting civilian populations and trying to kill Jews,” stated Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.). “It’s unconscionable and speaks volumes to their depraved inhumanity.”
Rep. Abe Hamadeh (R-Ariz.) stated that “the Iranian regime’s deliberate attack on an Israeli civilian hospital is despicable.”
Experts told JNS that Iran is accountable for attacking the hospital, but that its missiles aren’t “smart” enough to actually aim at a specific building from that far away.
“It’s unclear what exactly Iran was targeting, because we know their ballistic missiles have demonstrated significant levels of inaccuracy,” said Ryan Brobst, deputy director of the military and political power center at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
“It was certainly more than just superficial damage to the hospital, but the fact that Iran is knowingly firing inaccurate ballistic missiles at cities gives you a good idea of where their intentions lie,” Brobst told JNS.
Militaries, like Israel’s, try to reduce civilian casualties, but “Iran doesn’t seem to have made any effort to do so,” he said. “While targeting military infrastructure is on its face legal, doing so without regard for civilian casualties is potentially not legal under the laws of war and laws of armed conflict.”
Sam Lair, a research associate at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, told JNS that Iranian missiles appear to have a “circular error” probability of about three-quarters of a mile. That means “if you draw a radius around a desired target, half of the missiles that you fire will fall into that and then 90% of the missiles would fall within two circular error probables,” he said.
“If you’re using missiles with this type of capability to attack targets in dense urban areas, you’re rolling the dice that you’re going to hit non-combatants,” Lair said.
Annika Ganzeveld, Iran team lead for the American Enterprise Institute’s critical threats project, told JNS that the Islamic Republic has claimed that some of its missiles have a circular error probability of about 165 feet, and others of 350 to 1,000 feet.
“The Iranians themselves are claiming that they have these very small margins of error, and we have seen some direct impacts. It is possible that Iran is getting some through and that these are getting to the target,” Ganzeveld said.
“With the hospital today, the Iranians have claimed that they were targeting an Israeli C2 and intelligence headquarters nearby it,” she said. “It’s very difficult to tell whether they were actually targeting that alleged military headquarters, or if they were targeting the hospital.”
Gerald Steinberg, founder of NGO Monitor, posted a screen capture of a New York Times headline stating, “Israel says Iranian missile strikes major hospital,” which he called a “clown show.”
“The missile hit was clearly shown on live video, as was resulting destruction,” he wrote. “No justification for the ‘Israel says’ caveat. Those responsible for this headline, and all the others like it, should be helped out the door and to a different career track.”
Steinberg told JNS that the Times headline is part “of a clear pattern of negatively singling out Israel among many Times staff.”
“When Hamas or allied NGOs make false allegations about Israel, or casualty claims in Gaza, these are often repeated in the Times without the caveat of ‘Hamas says,’” he said.
Reporters, opinion writers and editors at the Times “openly display a mix of snarky bias and shallow understanding,” he told JNS. “The result is a corporate spin that leads to headlines that tell the reader to discount anything that would justify Israel’s response to deadly attacks like today’s.”
New capabilities?
Danny Danon, the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, told JNS that Iran “has amassed a sophisticated and dangerous arsenal of ballistic missiles and drones” and its attack on Soroka hospital “was deliberate and indiscriminate, an attempt to maximize civilian casualties.”
“Cluster munitions are designed to spread multiple explosions over a wide area, but Iran did not aim this weapon at a military base. It deliberately fired these munitions at civilians,” he said. “Iran’s intentions could not be clearer. Bloody murder.”
During Iran’s missile strike last year, the regime targeted Israeli military sites. “All of Israel is a legitimate target for the Iranian regime—schools, hospitals and communities,” he said of the current Iranian attacks.
The envoy told JNS that the silence at the United Nations about Iran’s attacks “has been deafening, and it is appalling that there hasn’t been clear and loud condemnation of the Islamic Republic’s attempt to kill Israeli civilians.”
“This points to the glaring hypocrisy of the United Nations that rushes to condemn Israel at any given moment and before all the facts are in place, but with other states, like the Islamic Republic and its indiscriminate attacks on Israeli civilian population centers, there is much more hesitation,” he said.
Military experts told JNS that more Iranian missiles appear to be striking Israeli territory without being shot down.
“It’s hard to say whether that’s an issue of Israel running low on interceptors, or whether that is Iran using more advanced munitions—new types of missiles that have a more advanced capability to get through air defenses,” Ganzeveld, of AEI, told JNS.
Israel has said that it eliminated about two-thirds of Iran’s missile launchers, which Ganzeveld said is important. “Even if Iran has thousands of ballistic missiles, or hundreds of ballistic missiles, left in its stockpile, those missiles aren’t really effective if Iran doesn’t have the launchers from which it can launch them at Israel,” she said.
“It seems that the Israel Defense Forces is very much prioritizing knocking out those launchers,” she added. “If Iran doesn’t have the launchers from which you can launch the missiles, then the number of missiles it has isn’t really going to matter, because it won’t be able to launch them.”
Brobst, of FDD, said that Israel might be saving its Arrow interceptors for ballistic missiles that appear headed to certain targets, if it is running low on interceptors. That would mean that it would let “others continue on and hit, which could lead to a higher rate of civilian casualties,” he told JNS.
“It’s unknown exactly what Israel’s Arrow stockpiles are, but it’s not surprising that they might be running low after intercepting so many incoming missiles,” he said.
Lair, of the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, told JNS that it has always “bedeviled missile defense” that “interceptors are vastly more expensive to produce than missiles.”
“This has always been true, just because the technology is more complicated. That means that the Iranians probably have more missiles than Israel has interceptors,” he said.
Interceptors don’t always work, which is why one can see videos of Iron Dome intercepts, in which “you’ll see multiple interceptors go up to get one missile,” Lair said. “On some level, it is kind of a matter of time before Israel runs out.”
“Will Iran be able to ride this out long enough to the point where they more or less exhaust the Israeli interceptor magazine?” Lair said. “That’s where we would see an inflection point in terms of the kind of coercive violence that the Iranians would be able to start delivering against Israel.”
But Iran has a “command and control problem,” according to Lair.
Israel wiped out the “higher echelons” of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on the first night of the attacks, which made it very hard for Iran to coordinate a response. “Similarly, Israel was very aggressive in suppressing that first line of Iranian missile bases,” Lair said. “That seriously inhibited Iran’s ability to generate strikes initially.”
“It’s so disorganized. There’s less of an understanding of who’s in charge,” he said of Tehran. “But also the Israelis are being very effective at destroying launchers, and this is all derived from their ability to control the airspace.”
Andrew Bernard, Vita Fellig
Source: https://www.jns.org/iran-liable-for-bombing-soroka-hospital-but-its-weapons-arent-smart-enough-to-aim-that-well-experts-say/
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