in the event of an Israeli attack on Iran is pure bunk and that Iran cannot do serious damage to Israel.
He said that if Iran ever fired its missiles at Israel, the civilian death toll would not be likely to top 500.
Barak denied news reports that he was preparing to lead Israel into a war with Iran. He said Israel “has not yet decided on any action, but the panic-sowing is at its peak.”
But he then made clear that Israel has done some calculus on the blood-cost of a war.
He didn’t explain how he made his calculations. But he presumably was assuming success by Israel’s anti-missile shield in stopping many but not all Iranian missiles and also assuming that Iranian missiles are not very accurate and will miss most population centers.
He did not mention that in 1991, when the US military drove Iraqi troops out of Kuwait, Saddam Hussein fired 39 missiles at Israel. Even without any missile defense at that time, those missiles killed only two people.
Missiles fell into parks, deserts, parking lots, warehouses and many assorted sites, but none found a packed apartment complex. A missile with a conventional warhead and limited accuracy is not a big threat. The hundreds of Iraqi missiles fired into Tehran and the Iranian missiles fired into Baghdad in 1988 are believed to have killed a few hundred people altogether in each city.