Cluster bombs disperse munitions over a wide area and are particularly dangerous for civilians, analysts say.

Hours after Israel’s assassination of Iranian security chief Ali Larijani on March 17, a little more than two weeks into their war, Iran fired a series of deadly cluster missiles at central Israel in what its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) described as “revenge” for his death.

The overnight attack deployed multiple-warhead missiles that can better evade defence systems and killed two people in the Ramat Gan area near Tel Aviv.

Falling shrapnel injured several other people and caused significant property damage, including at a Tel Aviv train station, according to Israeli media reports.

Al Jazeera’s Nida Ibrahim reported at the time that the two people killed, a couple in their 70s, had a safe room in their home but were unable to reach it in time, raising concerns that Israel’s air raid sirens were not sounding quickly enough for people to react.

But the use of cluster munitions has triggered broader alarm in Israel than any one incident – in a twist of fate for a country that has itself been accused of using these dangerous weapons.

“Each kind of warhead the Iranians have also uses a cluster warhead,” Uzi Rubin, founding director of Israel’s missile defence programme and a senior fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, told the US news agency Media Line.

Here is what we know about the use of cluster munitions:

Instead of a single explosive payload, a cluster warhead disperses multiple “bomblets” and has the potential for inflicting much wider damage and destruction than conventional warheads.

Cluster mechanisms can be used with any missiles designed to carry large payloads, such as ballistic and long-range missiles.