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Iron Beam

Israeli air defense system employing high-energy laser beam that is designed to destroy short-range rockets, artillery, and mortars

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJul 11, 2026
Entity authorityQ15633842
Source-derived summary

Iron Beam, officially Laser Dome in English and Eitan's Light (Hebrew: אור איתן) in Hebrew, is a directed-energy air defense system developed by Israeli defense contractor Rafael Advanced Defense Systems. It was unveiled at the Singapore Airshow on 11 February 2014.

The system is designed to destroy short-range rockets, artillery, and mortar bombs, and was scheduled to be deployed in October 2025, but was actually deployed December 2025. It has a range of up to 10 km (6.2 mi), complementing the Iron Dome system which was designed to intercept missiles launched from a greater distance. In addition, the system could also intercept unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs; drones) at a cost of US$3 per interception. Iron Beam will constitute the fifth element of Israel's integrated missile defense system, in addition to Arrow 2, Arrow 3, David's Sling and Iron Dome.

Name

The system's original name was "Iron Beam". It was later renamed "Magen Or" ("Shield of Light"). In September 2025, it was decided that the system's Hebrew name would be "Or Eitan" ("Eitan's Light") in memory of Captain Eitan Oster, an officer and combat soldier in the Egoz reconnaissance unit who was killed during the ground maneuver in Lebanon in the Gaza war. He was the son of Dov Oster, one of the system's key designers and developers.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Iron Beam” is israeli air defense system employing high-energy laser beam that is designed to destroy short-range rockets, artillery, and mortars. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Iron, Beam and Israeli, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—2014, 2025—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, Iron, Beam and Israeli is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “israeli air defense system employing high-energy laser beam that is designed to destroy short-range rockets, artillery, and mortars” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q15633842. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2014 and 2025.

Critical limits

Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

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Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Iron Beam” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.