I plead for journalists to actually inform themselves about the subject before they write.... :o
Israel has other ways to defend against Iranian missiles during the war, including via fighter jets, but the interceptors are among the most effective defensive weapons against long-range fire. Its Iron Dome missile defense system is designed to repel more short-range fire.
They speak of Iron Dome (short range, for slow rockets from inside the atmosphere) and THAAD (high altitude, for fast missiles re-entering from space) interchangeably. And they even mention fighter aircraft, which cannot do jack in either case.
The currently relevant scenarios:
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Hezbollah shoots unguided rockets at Israel -> Iron Dome intercepts maybe 15% of them (if the trajectory looks dangerous enough), and this costs about 10 times as much as the whole rocket salvo.
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Iran shoots an IRBM at Israel -> the IRBM splits up in space into cluster munitions -> Israel can intercept the MIRV bus (cluster munition housing), but it's empty at the time of getting intercepted. Not much point. And doing it would cost at least 10 times as much as the incoming missile did.
A missile defense system, in this case, cannot do jack either. For this type of attack, defense is would have a point if one was expecting to get nuked, becuause a nuclear-armed reentry vehicle cannot be made arbitrarily small, and the cost of leaving it un-intercepted would be extremely tragic.
In case of these projectiles, which are conventional and unguided in their final stage, one has to simply absorb the hits. This is the cost of war. And try to find the other guy's launchers, and try to prevent them from producing more.
And I'm not shedding any tears for Israel in this case. It definitely sucks to be bombed with cluster munitions, but they started this round of fighting, killed most people who they might have negotiated with, and aren't even new to using forbidden kinds of weapons (e.g. cluster munitions made of white phosphorus).