At least eight rockets were launched from the Rafah area in southern Gaza, the Israeli military said, adding that several were intercepted. No injuries were reported.
I'm assuming that this was okay because they do not count "lightly wounded" as an injury, as there are multiple reports of civilians being "lightly wounded" from this attack. Anyways, "at least 8 rockets". I've seen reports of "10 to 12" with 8 of them hitting locations inside Israel.
The BBC report notes that there is rocket damage reported in Herzliya, Petah Tivka, and Kefar Sava. Three different cities that are parts of Tel Aviv - so at least 3 rockets got through, and into populated areas of Israel. This is significant - the Iron Dome is actually incredibly effective and has been stopping rocket attacks quite reliably since October 7. That so many got through in this volley is not a good sign.
The best case scenario for Israel is that there was some sort of malfunction or other failure of the missile defense system. This is reasonable - no system is perfect 100% of the time. So perhaps there is a base chance of serious failure in the Iron Dome, where it loses a large amount of effectiveness once every 7 months or so. This sucks - but it also kind of makes sense how it might happen.
The biggest problem in this scenario is that the Israel security ecosystem is deeply allergic to any sort of accountability, so addressing this problem will be very difficult. If you refuse to acknowledge that anything has gone wrong, it's very hard to fix things. Still, even if nothing is done to prevent this sort of failure from recurring, the result is that the Iron Dome is maybe a bit less reliable than previously believed. Maybe a couple days per year its performance goes from stopping 9 out of 10 rockets down to 2 out of 10 rockets. The rockets themselves aren't anything like the American made 2,000 pound laser guided JDAMs that flatten entire buildings leaving 50 foot wide craters. They are far smaller - so maybe 8 more rockets may be getting through once or twice a year.
The worst case scenario is that Hamas now has rockets that are far harder to intercept. That would be very problematic for Israel. My understanding of the situation includes the assumption that Hamas does not have any credible way to actually do significant harm. But if they have Iron Dome evading rockets, this would no longer be true. And it would be a very significant change. Even if the rockets cannot do major damage and have very low accuracy, being able to hit Israel basically whenever they want - this can certainly change the dynamic. One mitigating factor is that maybe Israel can upgrade the Iron Dome with whatever next arms-race development is required to stop these rockets - but it certainly is not guaranteed that such an upgrade exists, let alone is feasible.
A couple of notes about this rocket barrage - it was launched from Eastern Rafah, an area the IDF just invaded and took control of. There are IDF forces patrolling Eastern Rafah right now. IOW, the IDF cannot stop rocket launches even when they are actively conducting military operations in the specific neighbourhood the rockets will be launched from.
This happened after Israel closed the Rafah crossing. Where did these rocket components come from? No one knows. But we do know that Israel seems to be incapable of stopping their delivery.
And of course - launching a volley of rockets and getting past the Iron Dome, also at the longest range they've ever managed. All of this says a lot about how well the campaign to "destroy Hamas" has been going. Hamas has also just claimed that they captured an IDF soldier. The official list of fallen IDF soldiers shows that May has not been a good month for them. Quite bad in fact - the worst since January - which is skewed by the surprise ambush where Hamas exploded a building on top of a couple dozen IDF soldiers.
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