In the middle of the day on Tuesday, it leaked out that the IDF Home Front was reducing its warning time window for the arrival of Iranian ballistic missiles.
In the early stage of the open war with Iran which started over the weekend, the IDF Home Front started to give a new three stage warning: a 18-30 minute initial warning when Iranian missile launchers were getting ready to fire, a 10 minute warning once the missiles were fired, and a 90-second air siren right before the rockets are expected to hit.
The purpose of these changes was to give civilians more time to prepare themselves for Iranian missile threats.
However, the IDF has now given two examples that proved, in polar opposite directions, that the new system was not working.
Changing priorities
In one case, the IDF Home Front's first warning, which was designed to keep people near a safe area for 30 minutes, ended up unnecessarily keeping citizens near their safe area for around four hours.
In that case, Iran did not fire as soon as expected, which caused the confusion.
However, in another case, Iran managed to fire sooner than the IDF Home Front expected, giving civilians less than 10 minutes to prepare with no pre-warning at the 18-30 minute point, confusing civilians about how much time they had to go to safe areas, with some civilians not making it to safe areas in time because of the confusion.
Based on these episodes, the IDF Home Front concluded that Iran was adjusting its firing patterns and that it could not reliably provide the 18-30 minute warning, such that it was ultimately decided to get rid of that longer warning and to stick to only the 10 minute warnings and the 90-second warning.