A leading us expert on missile defence has doubts about the effectiveness of Israel's Iron Dome defense system.
Israeli officials say hitting approximately 84% of the objectives that conflict with Hamas in Gaza last year.
But Professor Theodore Postol of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggests that the defence system success rate "drastically lower" may have been.
The success of the iron dome was one of the most significant military aspects of Israel's short campaign.
During this revival in the fight against operation pillar of Defense dubbed by the Israeli army, Israeli aircraft and artillery drones-bombarded Palestinian targets, while Palestinian groups fired more than 1,400 rockets on Israel.
The iron Dome missile defence system-built by the Israeli company, Rafael, but largely funded by the US-was rushed into service to defend against Palestinian rocket threat.
Track-recordMr Postol has a track-record in debunking health claims for state-of-the-art missile defense systems.
In the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf war after which lavish praise was directed to the Patriot defense system used by the Americans to defend against incoming Iraqi Scuds-Mr Postol has shown that the Patriot defenders were-like the Patriot self-wide of the mark.
Patriot of success rate, Popper, could be less than 10%, maybe even zero. It may actually have hit nothing.
Mr Postol criticism on the iron dome rests on the nature of the warhead carried by the interceptor rocket and the observed pathways or routes-the conflict of launches November 2012 studied.
In essence, he believes that the only way to definitely destroy the warhead of an incoming iron Dome rocket is to hit it head on.
"If the interceptor is a border crossing or diving route compared to that of the incoming missile flying," he told me, "then you're not going to destroy the warhead. Even hitting the incoming warhead side-on will probably do not have sufficient energy to explode it, he argues.
' Cheats 'Mr Postol says that while he can't say what the performance of iron Dome was in operation pillar of Defense, "all available evidence indicates unequivocally to a drastically lower level of performance than the 84% claimed by the Israel Defense Forces."
Its view is that the successful hit rate on incoming warheads as low as 5-10% would be able to.
Mr Postol says if the IDF wants to make such claims, then it should the data back-up.
He acknowledges that it could be "a reasonable strategy for Israel to claim that iron Dome was working, as an excuse not to attack Gaza a huge cost to both sides."
But he argues that "continuation of such deception lead only the Eclipse of limited defence resources to can".
Mr Postol says that "as an American supporter of Israel the right to self-defence", he does not feel comfortable seeing the us spend money on a weapon system "which hardly works".
The BBC tried to contact Rafael, Iron Dome manufacturer for a response to Mr Postol claims but was not able to get an answer.
Previously an IDF spokesman quoted in the Haaretz newspaper noted that "all interception by iron dome are examined with cross-checks of system data, radar [data], reports from different sources on the ground and other information. The data of [Iron Dome] activity was arrived at based on this process. "
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