Special to WorldTribune.com

WASHINGTON — Israel’s missile and rocket defense umbrella has saved numerous civilians, a report said.

A report by Yale University determined that Israel prevented massive casualties through its missile and rocket defense systems.

The report said the missile batteries as well as fortified rooms cut potential casualties from attacks from the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip by up to nine-fold.

“In spite of the bombardment of southern Israel by thousands of Qassam rockets fired from the Gaza Strip, comparatively few people have been injured or killed,” the report, titled “Mass Casualty Potential of Qassam Rockets,” said.

Authors Edward Kaplan and Lian Zucker examined the results of rocket attacks by Hamas and Palestinian militias on the southern Israeli city of Sderot, targeted for more than 12 years. The researchers asserted that Sderot would have sustained 75 casualties without a missile warning and defense system. Instead, 10 people were killed and 500 injured from 5,000 missiles and rockets from 2001 through 2010.

“Assuming an injury radius of only five meters from impact, the modeled expected casualties per rocket are between three [best-case] and nine [worst-case] times higher than Sderot’s observed casualties-to-rocket ratio, suggesting that Qassam-like terror attacks on unprotected urban locations could prove much more serious than what one would expect based solely on the observed number of casualties in Sderot,”
the report said.

The report disputed claims that the Qassam missile, with a range of more
than 20 kilometers, was essentially harmless. Kaplan, an engineering
specialist at the Yale School of Management and author of studies on
counter-insurgency, argued that Sderot’s civil defense significantly reduced
casualties from what had been years of nearly daily missile and rocket
strikes from the Gaza Strip.

Over the last year, Sderot has been protected by Israel’s new Iron Dome
missile and rocket defense system. The city has also employed the indigenous
Red Dawn system to alert residents of an imminent attack.

  Iron Dome, Qassam rockets, Red Dawn alert system, Report: Israeli missile defense has prevented mass casualties, Sderot, Yale University