 Israel is currently coming under a massive barrage of rocket attacks emanating from the Hamas terrorist organization in the Gaza Strip. Since the current round of escalation began last Saturday, Hamas has already sent several thousand rockets from the coastal strip into Israeli territory. The majority of these have been successfully intercepted by Israel's legendary Iron Dome defense system which is intended to intercept short-range missiles. However, the system isn't perfect. Just today, a house in Ashkelon suffered a direct hit and Israelis have been killed and maimed from previous rocket strikes. You may have wondered how much Israel actually has to spend in order to operate the system which is substantially assisted by US defense aid, and when you try to work it out the numbers are rather staggering. In order to take down Hamas rockets, Iron Dome fires a precision missile which collides with the incoming missile in midair. But both the launchers needed to fire the missiles and the actual projectiles themselves are rather mind-bogglingly expensive. In 2014, the cost of each interceptor missile was estimated to be somewhere between 20,000 and 50,000 US dollars. A later analysis, however, put the number at 100,000 to 150,000 US dollars. But for the purpose of this calculation, let's take 50,000 USD as a conservative number. Now, let's take a look at some footage that was shared of interceptions taking place and see if we can figure out how much money Israel spent on intercepting just this portion of this particular rocket barrage. We can count the interceptions by the number of bangs and flashes that appear in the sky. Here's some amazing footage of the Iron Dome defense system intercepting rockets over Ashkelon. And here's the same clip slowed down so that we can count the interceptions. In the first portion of this clip alone, I counted 24 Iron Dome interceptions. If we multiply that figure by 50,000 dollars per interceptor missile, we reach a total of 1.2 million US dollars. And if we use a higher estimate of 100,000 dollars per interceptor missile, we reach a cost for that interception round of 2.4 million US. Bear in mind, of course, that we're only looking at part of one interception from one barrage from one day of this particular conflict. So if we begin to multiply the numbers, we'll quickly arrive at a cost of potentially tens of millions of US dollars every single day.