Smaller polygons and cell alerts: How Israel’s Home Front Command honed its civilian alert system

People take cover as sirens sound to warn of incoming rockets, during a funeral ceremony in the northern town of Mitzpe Netofa on November 3, 2024. (Photo by JALAA MAREY/AFP via Getty Images)

JERUSALEM — Israel’s warfighting in Gaza and Lebanon may have spawned some technological leaps when it comes to combat operations, but according to an Israeli security official, advances weren’t constrained only to the fighting itself.

Israel’s Home Front Command, which is charged with protecting Israeli civilians, also evolved over the course of the year-plus conflicts, honing existing technology and developing new communication techniques to alert the populace to any threats — mostly coming in the form of rocket or drone attacks.

“Our motto is to get the early warning to every citizen in any place in Israel in any time,” the official, who requested their name not be used for security reasons, told Breaking Defense. “Because of the threats Israel has, it’s the most advanced system in the world.”

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The Hamas attack on Oct. 7 and subsequent attacks by that group, as well as by Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and directly from Iran, tested the alert system to its limits. Six months into the war, the Israel Defense Forces estimated around 12,200 rockets had been fired at Israel from Gaza, Lebanon and other fronts.

To better alert civilians to the threats, some of the Home Front Command’s adaptations were a refining of current systems. Israel has relied on a siren alert system in which sirens have been placed throughout the country. The country itself is digitally divided into different polygons. When a projectile appears to be heading towards any particular polygon — after likely being spotted by the same radar system that supports Israel’s multi-layered air defense shield — all the sirens in that polygon are commanded to sound the alarm.

But in previous decades the polygons could be quite large, meaning a solitary rocket could send the people of a whole city running for shelters, when the threat was really much more localized. Over time, Home Front Command has managed to be more precise in its predictions, and in its geographical alerts — essentially shrinking the polygons, and therefore the number of civilians who really need to be alerted.

Home Front Command also worked to alert individual citizens directly through their cell phones. The first method was with an app developed by the military in recent years that civilians could download that would receive alerts based on the cell phone’s geographical position.

But during this war, the command also added a new tactic: issuing alerts directly to relevant phones using cell broadcasts. That system uses existing cell technology but doesn’t have to rely on the user having downloaded the app or having GPS to locate the phone (a good thing, since Israel reportedly jammed some GPS signals near combat zones.) The direct cell broadcast alert was first used during Iran’s second ballistic missile and drone attack on Israel in October 2024, the official said. (Drones also provide a novel problem for an alert system that relies on threats having a predictable trajectory, though the official said vaguely the command has learned lessons from Ukraine’s experience fighting Russia to better deal with those.)

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Beyond cell phones, the official said the Home Front Command has worked to beam alerts directly into Internet of Things devices, like Smart TVs, so that someone watching the TV at home would get a digital alert if they need to run for shelter.

Each singular alert systems has its weaknesses — what if a civilian can’t hear the sirens, or doesn’t have the app, or isn’t near their phone, etc. — but the official suggested that the idea is to have a layered alert system that raises the odds of citizens getting at least one warning that they could be in danger.

In the future, the official said, Home Front Command could try to beam alerts directly into smart cars, so drivers would be immediately made aware of threats. Cloud computing, the official added, is being evaluated to see if it could offer aid as the program gets more data heavy.

“We always look ahead for new technology and how they can be implemented in our systems and do it even better,” the official said.