By Steven Scheer
TEL AVIV, May 11 (Reuters) - Israel's Iron Dome has been nearly 99% effective against missiles from Hamas and Hezbollah militants and has knocked out most missiles from Iran, the chairman of state-owned Iron Dome maker Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd said on Monday.
Rafael's Yuval Steinitz told a conference of the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs that since the October 2023 Hamas raid on Israel, Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon have between them fired some
40,000 rockets at Israel.
"Iron Dome intercepted most of them with success rates that (are) not 100% but close to 100%. It's around 98%, even 99%, so it's not perfect, but almost," Steinitz said.
Iran, he said, has fired about 1,500 ballistic missiles at Israel in two rounds of fighting since 2024 and "only several dozens" were not intercepted.
He noted that there was no shortage of missile interceptors.
Steinitz said that, without the Iron Dome missile defence system largely funded by the United States, Israel's economy would be "totally paralysed" as people would not go to work and schools would be closed, while military bases would also find it difficult to function.
"We would (also) have bloodshed in all our major cities... several thousands of Israeli civilians would be killed without Iron Dome," he said.
As intelligence and strategy minister more than a decade ago in a government led by Benjamin Netanyahu, Steinitz was a chief negotiator for Israel in the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that the U.S. signed with Iran to curb its nuclear programme.
Steinitz was opposed to the JCPOA, from which President Trump withdrew in 2018.
Any deal between the U.S. and Iran, Steinitz said, should include a minimum time of uranium enrichment of no less than 20 years and Iran committing "not to develop other kinds of weapon of mass destruction - chemical and biological weapons".
(Reporting by Steven Scheer; Editing by Hugh Lawson and Alex Richardson)
