Israeli Defense Minister Yisrael Katz and IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Eyal Zamir said Wednesday that Israel has dropped more than 15,000 bombs on Iran since the war began on February 28 — a volume more than four times the total munitions used during Operation Rising Lion last June.

But the milestone masks a striking shift. The war is slowing down, and the numbers make that impossible to hide.

In the conflict’s opening days, both Israel and the United States were each hitting roughly 1,000 targets per day, an extraordinary tempo that was never sustainable. Fighter jets were wearing down. The limited pool of combat pilots needed sleep. Within days, the pace began to ease. By mid-March, it dropped off a cliff.

From March 13 to 19, Israel’s bomb count grew from approximately 10,000 to 12,000. On some days during that stretch, the IDF reported as few as 50 strikes — a fraction of the early-war blitz. The American campaign has followed a similar trajectory: from March 18 to 23, the number of U.S. targets struck rose from 7,800 to roughly 9,000, an average of about 240 per day, and likely declining further.

There are signs that bombing picked up modestly between March 19 and 25, but levels remain far below the intensity of early March.

The slowdown isn’t just about fatigue. On March 19, IDF sources acknowledged that approximately 90 percent of pre-war designated targets had already been struck. Israel and the U.S. are, in plain terms, running out of things to hit.

That reality reflects a hard ceiling on what air power alone can accomplish. Iran’s military numbers some 400,000 active-duty personnel, with an additional one to two million Basij militia members — a force that cannot be dismantled from the sky, and that neither Jerusalem nor Washington appears to be trying to reach by air.

The IDF continues to issue a steady stream of updates on the more than 3,000 individual targets it has struck, averaging four or more bombs per target. The Pentagon, by contrast, has grown notably quieter, sending fewer updates with each passing week.

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)