Iran just launched over 400 ballistic missiles at Israel

It is definitely not in major cities, otherwise we would've already known.

It might be that Iran doesn't want to cause any real damage (as then Israel would destroy its oil industry and nuclear sites in retaliation) — it only wants to save face. For that, a media picture of "hundreds of missiles falling on Israel" would perfectly suffice — they can sell it domestically. Just bomb some bushes and deserts and call it a day.

Those could have been fragments of already intercepted ballistic missiles though.

Well there was one kill, a Palestinian man in Jericho with a dead missile falling on his head.

"Hypersonic" is a misnomer, most long range rockets hit hypersonic speeds. "Hypersonic" refers to steerable hypersonic glide vehicles that can turn to make them harder to intercept. There is no evidence yet that any of them were used in this attack.

If it's the Fattah-1, it was developed in-house by the IRGC.

Having said that, I have no idea if there was some tech transfer from Russia to Iran to enable it.

Ballistic missile warheads have flown at these speeds for many years. The term "hypersonic" when it refers to missiles is frustratingly imprecise; hypersonic in the sense you're using it refers to more modern weapons capable of substantial maneuvers and not restricted to a ballistic trajectory. Iran is incapable of producing these types of weapons.

Note that plain old ballistic missile warheads are quite challenging to intercept. Past operational systems used nuclear warheads on the interceptors.

Even Nazi Germany's V2 was almost hypersonic. "Hypersonic" is an abused term from Russia to make old missiles sound better than they are.

There is extensive footage online: below is an example with multiple attempts at interception in a location which, presumably, must be somewhere "important" for those systems to be present. I'd argue it's difficult to claim such barrages can be "tracked, detected, ignored". As for the casualties, it's only been a short period of time, one would hope they do not increase as the situation is assessed.

https://x.com/UKR_Report/status/1841172196678311945

When Iran struck US bases in Iraq in 2020, there were also no deaths. Drone footage shows that the Iranian missiles hit their targets: [0]. The reason why nobody died was that the Iranians told the Americans in advance that they were going to attack.

Iran also gave Israel advance warning of this attack, and again only struck military targets. That's why no Israelis died.

0. https://youtu.be/YfjxHjs0hKo?si=pU004yvIsl4TpD8e

Some cheesy Scud derivative banged out with low labor costs and minimal regard for materials and tolerances? Probably cost as much in HE and fuel as baseline hw under mass production.

What are the ingredients to a missile? 1 fashioned cylinder, 4 winglets, 1 Raspberry Pi, 1 large glob of explosives, 1 solid fuel propellant?

Obviously I'm being facetious, but we're not talking about some crazy hi-tech gizmos or even genuinely ground-breaking technology, and that price does get a Tesla or two, so really $100,000 isn't cheap. Plus we are not discussing U.S. DoD contractor prices which "everyone knows" have no known correlation to reality.

Deliberate misunderstandings or just a general incomprehension of how deterrence works.

You use deterrence to prevent a bigger conflict. It's on Israel and its leadership (Bibi) that they used the lull between their increasingly brazen attacks against their opponents as an excuse to launch a full scale invasion of a neighbouring country.