Last week, for the first time, the IDF shot down a missile fired from Gaza with a “directed-energy engagement system”—in layman’s terms, a laser. This experimental new system, known as the Iron Beam, has been developed to supplement, and perhaps one day to supplant, the Iron Dome. Elliott Abrams explains its significance:

Israel’s Iron Dome missile-defense system is well known, and it works beautifully: 90-percent effective. But it is expensive: each Iron Dome battery can cost $100 million, and each interceptor costs between $40,000 and $50,000. As Hamas fires its thousands of rockets and missiles at Israel—it’s fired an estimated 10,000 since October 7—the costs of defense mount and the supply of interceptors can run out.

Iron Dome batteries typically have about 60 to 80 interceptor missiles at hand. What if Hizballah or Hamas fires 100 missiles at one location? A laser system overcomes these problems. As long as you have electricity, you have laser beams to fire again and again at incoming threats. Swarms of approaching missiles can’t overwhelm the number of interceptors you have on hand, and there’s no need to worry about resupply—the kind of resupply the United States is now providing Israel.

Today, Israel can be forced to spend thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to shoot down Hamas rockets that cost $600 each. With lasers, the balance of costs all of a sudden will favor the defender, not the aggressor. . . . No doubt Hizballah and Iran are watching and worrying.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].