The Brief

Iran launched at least seven ballistic missile salvos at Israel overnight Sunday, striking 23 sites across the Tel Aviv region and wounding at least three people as the war entered its sixteenth day. Cluster munition warheads — now carried by roughly half of Iran’s missiles — dispersed submunitions across central and southern Israel, sparking fires and rendering thousands of homes uninhabitable.

The Report

Sirens sounded across central Israel, the West Bank, and Eilat beginning at approximately 1:30 a.m. Sunday, with further waves at 2:30 a.m. and 5:30 a.m. as Iran fired seven ballistic missile salvos targeting multiple regions simultaneously. Two men, aged 62 and 44, sustained light injuries from the initial volleys. A third man in central Israel was evacuated in moderate condition with glass shards embedded in his head.

Shrapnel strikes were reported throughout the day in Rishon Lezion, Ramle, Bnei Brak, and as far north as Metula, where a cluster munition fired from Lebanon hit without causing casualties. Israel’s government reported 3,481 people now staying in hotels after their homes were declared uninhabitable — primarily in Tel Aviv-Yafo, Beit Shemesh, Be’er Sheva, Ramat Gan, and Bnei Brak.

The tactical challenge posed by Iran’s cluster munitions has sharpened over the course of the conflict. According to IDF figures, Iran has fired approximately 300 ballistic missiles at Israel since February 28, roughly half carrying cluster warheads that disperse between 24 and 80 submunitions across a ten-kilometre radius. In a single attack on March 12, eleven cluster missiles penetrated Israeli air defenses, with one scattering at least 70 bomblets over the greater Tel Aviv area. During last year’s Twelve-Day War, only three cluster missiles reached Israeli territory.

The rate of Iranian fire has declined substantially — from roughly 90 missiles on the first day to approximately five per day by mid-March — after the IDF reported destroying over 300 Iranian missile launchers, an estimated 60% of the country’s stockpile. Israel has conducted more than 7,600 strikes and destroyed 2,200 regime targets across Iran, with IDF Spokesperson Brig. Gen. Effie Defrin telling CNN that operations would continue for “at least three more weeks” with “thousands of targets” remaining.

Competing narratives emerged over Israel’s interceptor reserves. Semafor reported that Israel had informed the United States it was critically low on ballistic missile interceptors, with $2.4 billion worth of Patriot interceptors expended in the war’s first five days alone. IDF sources denied any shortage, calling the reports possible Iranian disinformation. The Pentagon said its own stockpiles remained sufficient.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi rejected any interest in a ceasefire. “We never asked for a ceasefire, and we have never asked even for negotiation,” he told CBS, adding that Iran was “stable and strong enough” and “only defending.” President Trump contradicted this characterisation, stating that “Iran wants to make a deal, and I don’t want to make it because the terms aren’t good enough yet.”

Since the war began on February 28, Iranian strikes have killed between 13 and 15 people in Israel and wounded over 3,000. US-Israeli strikes have killed at least 1,444 Iranians by Tehran’s count, with external estimates running considerably higher. Hezbollah has opened a parallel front from Lebanon, where 826 people have been killed, and Iranian missile and drone attacks have struck US bases and allied nations across the Gulf. The International Energy Agency announced the release of 411.9 million barrels of emergency oil reserves to stabilise global markets.

The Angle

The cluster munition numbers tell a story that neither side’s official narrative quite addresses. Iran’s missile rate has collapsed — from 90 a day to five — and the IDF’s strike campaign has, by its own accounting, dismantled the majority of Iran’s launch infrastructure. By every volumetric measure, Iran is losing the exchange and losing it fast. But the shift to cluster warheads has introduced a problem that volume metrics do not capture. A single missile scattering 70 submunitions across the Tel Aviv metropolitan area does not need to be one of many. It needs to be one of a few that gets through. The defence architecture was engineered for a world in which interception meant neutralisation. Cluster payloads designed to disperse before the intercept point rewrite that equation — not by overwhelming the system with quantity, but by making the definition of “successful intercept” structurally incomplete.

The interceptor dispute sits at the centre of this. Whether Israel is critically low or comfortably supplied is, in a sense, beside the point that the question is being asked at all sixteen days into a conflict against a degraded adversary. The system is being tested not against Iran’s full arsenal but against its residue — and the residue is performing differently than the arsenal did. That is the kind of tactical adaptation that matters more than the declining salvo count suggests.

Wars of attrition are not won by the side that runs out of weapons last. They are won by the side whose remaining weapons still match the problem. Iran’s missile stockpile is shrinking. What remains in it is changing faster than the defences arranged against it.

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