On September 8, 2024, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) executed one of the most daring and complex operations in its history: a deep-penetration commando raid into Syria targeting an underground missile-production facility near Masyaf, codenamed Deep Layer. The site had been constructed by Iran to supply precision-guided missiles to Hizballah and other Iranian proxies—posing a strategic threat Israel could not ignore. Buried more than 400 feet underground, it was close to reaching the capacity to produce missiles with ranges up to 300 kilometers, capable of striking major Israeli cities and military installations.
This was much more than simply a tactical raid—it was a doctrinal inflection point. It challenged assumptions about Israel’s strategic posture, redefined the limits of special operations in the region, and signaled a new era in how states counter adversaries operating from hardened spaces on enemy territory. By executing this mission, Israel changed its playbook, shifting from a largely reactive posture—focused on retaliatory airstrikes and the maintenance of deterrence by aggressive responses to attacks—to a proactive doctrine of deep penetration, operational surprise, and joint-force synchronization, aimed at denying the enemy the ability to attack in the first place. Put differently, it was perhaps a return from the doctrines of the past three decades to something more akin to the IDF’s original approach to warfighting.
While global attention has largely fixated on Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, the IDF has been simultaneously waging a multi-front campaign of historic proportions. Over the past many years, Iran had developed a network of proxy forces with striking capabilities against Israel. In the days following the October 7 attacks and the outbreak of war, those proxies began to launch rockets and drones into Israeli territory. The best-known events of this campaign took place on the Lebanese front, where, in a matter of weeks, Israel dismantled much of Hizballah’s military-political leadership through precision strikes, exposed and disrupted its command-and-control networks with the now-famous booby-trapped pagers and walkie-talkies, and destroyed the crown jewel of the group’s arsenal: its vast rocket stockpiles, long believed untouchable.
Against this backdrop of encirclement by Iran’s proxies, the Masyaf missile complex—a deeply buried, Iranian-built site designed to produce hundreds of advanced missiles annually for Hizballah—represented an intolerable strategic threat. Its location in Syria, far from Israel’s borders but directly tied to Hizballah’s arsenal in Lebanon, underscored the transnational nature of Iran’s proxy-warfare strategy, and its underground construction is emblematic of Iran’s strategic response to Israeli air dominance. Traditional airstrikes alone are insufficient to neutralize this kind of fortified and subterranean facility, designed to counter the well-developed air superiority of Israel and other Western-allied forces. What followed was an operation that met both aspects of the Iranian threat, and will be studied for years in both military and strategic terms.
The raid—codenamed Operation Many Ways—was executed by approximately 120 commandos from the Israeli air force’s elite Shaldag unit, supported by Unit 669, the IDF’s combat search-and-rescue force. Four Sikorsky CH-53 helicopters carried the assault force low over the Mediterranean to evade radar detection, bringing them more than 200 kilometers into Syrian territory. Because of the extended range, the helicopters were refueled mid-air, a logistical feat that added further complexity and risk.
To suppress air defenses and divert attention from the infiltration corridor, simultaneous Israeli airstrikes were launched against Syrian military sites. These initial strikes also targeted, and reportedly eliminated, many of the approximately 30 Syrian guards and soldiers stationed at the missile complex. Upon landing, the commandos moved quickly to secure the perimeter and engage any remaining hostile troops before breaching the fortified entrances of the facility. The rapid and lethal neutralization of the site’s defenses was essential to preventing a larger confrontation and buying the critical window of time needed for the mission’s success.
Intelligence had also identified the presence of forklifts at the facility—equipment normally inconsequential in combat operations. But in this case, Israeli planners trained soldiers in forklift operation ahead of the mission, using them on site to maneuver obstacles, breach heavily fortified steel doors, and speed up access to internal bunkers. It was a tactical adjustment emblematic of the broader mission: planned, rehearsed, and executed with clinical precision.
Knowing they would be on the ground for an extended period—approximately two-and-a-half hours—the IDF incorporated a full-spectrum medical contingency. A dedicated medical aircraft, equipped to function as a forward surgical hospital, accompanied the commandos. This wasn’t a plan based on hope; it was designed with the realistic expectation of possible casualties deep inside hostile territory, with no feasible medevac options under Syrian radar and missile coverage.
The entire assault concluded without a single Israeli casualty. It is a remarkable feat that reflects both the tactical prowess of the units involved and the deliberate preparation—underpinned by highly accurate intelligence, mock-site rehearsals, and precision timing—that made the operation possible.
Israel’s ability to reach hardened targets didn’t begin with the strike on Deep Layer. The country has a long track record of daring operations in hostile and difficult-to-reach environments where geography, risk, and political fallout would deter most military planners. In 2018, Mossad agents infiltrated a guarded warehouse in the heart of Tehran and extracted more than 100,000 documents and digital files from Iran’s clandestine nuclear archive. The operation, conducted in a single night and involving physical break-in, document scanning, and exfiltration under hostile surveillance, revealed critical evidence that Iran had preserved its nuclear-weapons-program infrastructure in defiance of international agreements. It was a masterclass in strategic intelligence—one that informed Israeli policy and shaped global debate over the true scope of Tehran’s intentions.
In the current war, the Israeli air force proved its reach in a complex, long-range, aerial assault into Iran on October 26, 2024, involving over 100 aircraft—including F-35I “Adir” stealth fighters—striking Iranian military targets more than 2,000 kilometers away. That operation relied on stand-off precision munitions and aerial refueling over thousands of miles of contested airspace. Operation Many Ways is different from either of these previous endeavors. It required boots on the ground, in a hardened underground target, with every minute on-site increasing the risk of confrontation with Syrian or Iranian response forces. That contrast matters: while the Mossad mission showcased impressive intelligence capabilities, and the air-force mission proved long-distance technological reach, Many Ways exhibited expeditionary resolve and has reshaped the battlefield logic of Israel’s enemies.
The raid on Masyaf was not just a successful strike on a weapons factory—it was a demonstration of capability with profound strategic implications. That demonstration carries added weight when seen in the context of Iran’s expanding regional footprint. Tehran has invested heavily in constructing underground facilities in Yemen—used by its Houthi proxies to store and launch drones and missiles toward Israel and allied targets. These sites are increasingly hardened, dispersed, and clearly modeled on Iran’s own underground playbook. Many Ways may therefore serve as a model for future Israeli actions—not only against Iranian nuclear sites but also against its proxy networks in Yemen and beyond.
In its wake, Iran and its network of proxies and allies will be forced to reassess the survivability of even their most hardened infrastructure—and that recalculation may have ripple effects across their force posture, dispersion, and defensive strategy.
From Hamas’s tunnels in Gaza to Hizballah’s bunkers in Lebanon and Iran’s underground missile silos, the subterranean domain has become a central tool of Israel’s enemies for creating strategic depth. These networks are not only intended to hide assets but to deter intervention by imposing prohibitive costs on would-be attackers. This is more than just a tactical adaptation—it reflects a sophisticated form of warfare where threats are concealed, hardened, and often embedded in sovereign or sensitive terrain. The IDF’s success in Masyaf demonstrates that a well-executed raid, grounded in superior intelligence and operational surprise, can overcome even the most elaborate underground defenses. Whether in Gaza, Syria, Yemen, or potentially Iran, Israel has shown it can penetrate not just underground facilities, but the illusions of impunity that those facilities have offered to its enemies.
It is no longer unreasonable to believe that this capability may soon be tested far beyond the Syrian frontier. Iran’s most sensitive nuclear infrastructure—specifically, its uranium-enrichment facilities at Natanz and Fordow—is buried so deep underground that even America’s most advanced bunker-busting munitions would struggle to inflict terminal damage. The Natanz complex is estimated to lie 80 to 100 meters beneath the surface, protected by layers of reinforced concrete and mountain rock. Fordow, carved directly into a mountainside, is likely buried at a similar or even greater depth. Airstrikes alone may not suffice. If Israel assesses that Iran is on the brink of weaponizing its nuclear program, it may ultimately require a ground-based, deep-penetration operation akin to what was done at Deep Layer—one capable of physically breaching and disabling the hardened components of Iran’s nuclear apparatus. That would entail extraordinary risks, but, after the success of Many Ways, it is no longer beyond the realm of operational possibility. Israel has shown it can operate beneath hardened concrete and across sovereign boundaries alike.
Operation Many Ways wasn’t just a successful raid—it marked the arrival of a new operational doctrine in the Middle East, where precision, initiative, and political will are redrawing the map of what is militarily possible in the modern Middle East.
In U.S. military history, the 1945 Cabanatuan raid by Army Rangers to rescue POWs in the Japanese-occupied Philippines offers a similar template of deep insertion, overwhelming force, and rapid exfiltration. More recently, the 2011 Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan—conducted without prior coordination with Islamabad—highlighted the modern utility of such missions in countering existential threats. But these types of missions are never risk-free. The 1980 Operation Eagle Claw, a failed U.S. attempt to rescue hostages from Tehran, is a reminder that even the best-trained forces can falter when complex planning meets unexpected friction.
Israel’s success at Masyaf wasn’t guaranteed. It came from the intersection of intelligence, innovation, and courage. It also came at a moment when Israel’s enemies, backed by Iran, were counting on deep geography and underground engineering to immunize their most critical weapons programs. Operation Many Ways shattered that assumption.
In an era of subterranean warfare and dispersed threats, the IDF didn’t just eliminate a missile factory. It demonstrated that no target is beyond reach. This raid will be remembered as one of the most significant military operations in modern Israeli history—an assertion of capability, a recalibration of deterrence, and a signal to every adversary in the region that Israel’s reach is not limited by geography, and its resolve is not constrained by risk. Future adversaries will now think twice about burying threats underground—because Israel has proven it can bury them deeper.
