Israeli pilots are warning they are flying “into the dark” as the air force ramps up ultra‑low strikes against Iran’s expanding maze of underground missile complexes — a hidden world commanders privately describe as an “unknown hell” beneath the desert.

Night after night, F‑35s and F‑15s dive toward blacked‑out valleys and mountain ridges, dropping bunker‑buster bombs and earth‑penetrating munitions at GPS coordinates that represent tunnel mouths and buried launch rails they have never seen with their own eyes. Cockpit footage leaked to local media shows instruments screaming altitude warnings as jets skim terrain only seconds from disaster.

What terrifies planners in Tel Aviv isn’t just what they know is there, but what they don’t. Intelligence officers admit Iran’s Khorramshahr‑4 and Fattah missile networks now run through kilometres of hardened tunnels, decoy shafts and underground rail systems designed to move launchers before satellites can lock on. “We’re striking shadows and hoping the shadows bleed,” one analyst says.

Each partial success — a collapsed entrance, a secondary explosion — is followed by fresh missile salvos arcing back toward Israel, proof that much of the arsenal remains intact. War‑room maps fill with red circles marking “suspected but unconfirmed” sites; pilots joke grimly that the target list is starting to look like Swiss cheese.

On Israeli talk shows, the anxiety is palpable: can even the region’s most advanced air force keep up with a missile machine buried deeper every day? Or has Iran already built an underground world that no number of sorties can truly reach — turning Israel’s technological edge into a nightly, nerve‑shredding plunge into the unknown?