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U.S. Officials Watched with Mounting Alarm as Scale of Iran Attack on Israel Became Clear
(Wall Street Journal) Michael R. Gordon - President Biden and his national-security team watched with mounting alarm on April 13 as monitors in the White House Situation Room showed 30, then 60, then over 100 Iranian ballistic missiles streaking toward Israel. Iranian cruise missiles and a swarm of drones were already in the air, timed to arrive at the same time as the missiles. The scale of Tehran's direct attack on Israel matched U.S. spy agencies' worst-case scenarios, U.S. officials said later. Biden's top aides watched Iran remove missiles from storage and put them on launchers. When the attack began Saturday night, U.S. officials in the Situation Room and at the Pentagon tracked the three waves of weapons that left Iranian airspace, crossing Iraq and Jordan, racing toward Israel. The scale of the barrage was a shock, administration officials said. "This was on the high end, I think, of what we were anticipating," a senior official said. No one had ever tried to intercept so many ballistic missiles at once. Washington thought its and Israeli forces could handle 50 ballistic missiles, but more than 100 was unknown territory. Israel's Arrow system intercepted most of the ballistic missiles, while two American destroyers in the eastern Mediterranean downed several others.