A day after a drone launched by Yemen’s Houthi guerrillas hit Tel Aviv, causing one death, the Israeli army has responded by bombing Yemeni territory with F-15 fighter jets, the army confirmed in a statement. The Israeli fighters have hit various infrastructures in the port of the city of Hodeida, including some energy facilities, used for “terrorist” purposes, explained Nadav Shoshani, a military spokesman, in a statement. He also maintains that it is through this place that Iran supplies weapons to the rebels with which they carry out attacks against Israel and other countries.
“There is a price for Israeli blood,” whether in Lebanon, Gaza, Yemen or elsewhere, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant warned after a meeting in Tel Aviv with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other military officials to monitor the response of his troops. Gallant said that Yemen’s Shiite guerrillas have attacked Israel more than 200 times, without causing any fatalities so far. “The fire that is currently taking place in Yemen is seen throughout the Middle East. The first time the Houthis have harmed an Israeli citizen, we have hit them. And we will do so wherever necessary,” Gallant said in a video posted on the social network X (formerly Twitter).
All of them were “military targets,” Shoshani insisted, without giving details about possible victims. For their part, the Houthi rebels said in a statement that civilian targets had been hit. Israel, which maintains that it had previously warned the United States of the offensive, will continue to defend itself if necessary: “This is not just an Israeli problem, it is a global problem,” he added.
The Houthi offensive, which unexpectedly bypassed Israeli air defenses on Friday, “violates international law and increases instability in the Middle East,” Shoshani said without confirming whether this is the first time Israel has bombed Yemen during the current war. “It was an Israeli air attack,” he stressed without specifying whether there was possible coordination with other countries, such as the United States or the United Kingdom, which in recent months have also been confronting the Yemeni guerrillas. The White House has reported that its forces have not been involved in Saturday’s attacks.
The rebels have reported that Israeli planes have bombed oil depots as well as the power station in the port city of Hodeida. They added that the attack has caused “martyrs and wounded”, without specifying a number so far, according to the Al-Masirah TV channel, citing the Ministry of Health. “A brutal Israeli aggression against Yemen targeted civilian facilities, oil depots and the power station in Hodeida,” said the spokesman for the Shiite guerrilla, Mohamed Abdelsalam, in a post on X, while emphasizing that they will not stop supporting Gaza, reports Efe.
The current escalation is a new step in the war in which Israel already maintains fronts in Gaza and on the Lebanese border, in addition to attacking Syrian territory with some frequency. The Jewish State took the Houthi attack seriously from the outset. In fact, it decided to respond within a few hours. “Recently, Israeli army fighter jets attacked military targets of the Houthi terrorist regime in the area of the port of Hodeida in Yemen in response to the hundreds of attacks carried out against the State of Israel in recent months,” the army said in a statement.
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Hodeida is located in eastern Yemen on the shores of the Red Sea, from where the Houthis have launched drones and missiles to attack numerous merchant ships in recent months, causing significant losses in the Suez Canal, one of the world’s main shipping routes. The Houthi militia has controlled northwestern Yemen, including the capital, Sana’a, for almost a decade.
In the early hours of Friday, in an unprecedented attack during the current war, a drone struck a building in Tel Aviv, killing one person. The drone was launched by the Houthis and reached Israeli territory without being intercepted by Israeli anti-aircraft systems, and flew at least 1,700 kilometers away, according to the Israeli army.
“Human error”
Senior Israeli political, military and intelligence officials held various meetings throughout Friday in which they discussed the drone attack, the security failures — initially blamed on “human error” — and the possible consequences it could have on the conflict. They did not expressly announce any reprisals like those launched on Saturday.
The Israeli military believes the drone was Iranian-made, a Samad-3 model upgraded to be able to reach Tel Aviv, some 2,000 kilometres from Yemen, and also to bypass the anti-aircraft system known as the Iron Dome, one of the crown jewels of the Jewish state’s defence.
The Houthis, a guerrilla group supported by Iran like the Palestinians of Hamas or the Lebanese of Hezbollah, named the drone after Yafa, the historic Palestinian city located just south of Tel Aviv. In a statement published on X, they threatened to continue their offensive on Israel’s economic capital, a city on the shores of the Mediterranean where life on Saturday continued with absolute normality.
On April 13, Iran launched an offensive with some 200 drones and missiles on Israel, which caused no casualties. Fears of an escalation of the conflict in the region spread. The Israeli army responded six days later with a limited-intensity bombardment.
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