A few days ago, Hezbollah and Shia Axis media outlets published a video of an attack carried out by Hezbollah on May 7th against civilian houses in the Israeli community of Shtula.
Several sources speculated that this was the first documented use of the laser-guided Arash rocket.
The Arash is a 122mm rocket manufactured by Iran and is based on the old Russian Grad rocket (BM-21). Throughout the years Iran developed several versions of this rocket, extending its range from 20 km to 40 km. In addition, while the first generations of the Arash were unguided, some of the later generations are laser-guided, which makes them precision rockets.
Besides the Iranian armed forces, these rockets are being used by most of the Iranian proxies in the Middle East, including the Shia militias in Iraq, the Houthis, and of course, Hezbollah. In addition, it appears that Iran also transferred these rockets to Russia and there are also reports they are also being used by Ukraine.
In this context it is important to note that it is highly probable that Hezbollah has upgraded some of its unguided rockets to laser-guided ones.
However, a more thorough examination of the video published by the Shia outlets raises the possibility that the weapon used to attack Shtula was the Iranian-made Tharallah anti-tank system.
The Tharallah, which was introduced in 2015, is an Iranian system based on the Russian Kornet (9m133). The Iranian version uses a dual-launcher that fires Dehlavieh missiles (an Iranian copy of the Kornet missile). This unique system has the ability to fire two missiles in a very short interval (about half a second), in order to overwhelm the Trophy (Windbreaker) active protection system used by Israeli armored vehicles and tanks. The Tharallah system also has an option of separating the crew away from the launcher by placing them up to hundred meters apart. This is intended at increasing the crew’s survivability.
