Israel bombs Yemen after Houthi guerrilla drone attack on Tel Aviv | International

A day after a drone launched by Yemen’s Houthi guerrillas attacked Tel Aviv, the Israeli army has responded by bombing Yemeni territory with F-15 fighter jets, as the army confirmed in a statement. As a military spokesman Nadav Shoshani told a hearing, Israeli fighters have damaged various infrastructure in the port of the city of Hodeida, including some energy facilities used for “terrorist” purposes. In addition, they say that from the same place Iran supplies weapons to the rebels, from which they carry out attacks against Israel and other countries.

“The port that was attacked is not an innocent port,” said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who published a video on his profile on the social network to thank the help provided by other countries to counter the Houthi attacks of recent months. “I have a message for Israel’s enemies: make no mistake about us,” warned the president, who plans to visit the United States this Sunday. “We will defend ourselves by all means, on all fronts. Anyone who harms us will pay a very heavy price,” he added.

Rebels reported that Israeli aircraft bombed an oil depot as well as a power plant in the port city of Hodeida. They also added that there were “martyrs and wounded” in the attack, without giving the number, according to Al-Masirah TV network, which cited the Health Ministry. Later, local media linked to the Houthi militia published that at least 80 were injured, some of them with severe burns. “The brutal Israeli aggression against Yemen targeted civilian facilities, oil depots and a power plant in Hodeida,” Mohammed Abdelsalam, a spokesman for the Shiite guerrillas, said in a publication, according to news agency Efe. “They are going to stop supporting Gaza.”

“The blood of Israelis has a price” whether it is in Lebanon, Gaza, Yemen or elsewhere, Defense Minister Yoav Galant has stressed, after a meeting in Tel Aviv with Netanyahu and other military officials who oversee the operation of their troops. Galant has assured that Yemen’s Shiite guerrillas have attacked Israel on more than 200 occasions so far, but there have been no casualties. “The fire that is currently burning in Yemen is being seen throughout the Middle East. For the first time the Houthis have harmed an Israeli civilian, we have beaten them. And we will do it wherever necessary,” Galant said in a video published on X.

Spokesman Shoshani stressed that all of these have been “military objectives”, without giving details about possible victims. For their part, the Houthi rebels have said in a statement that civilian targets have been targeted and that they will continue to attack Israel, including civilians. Israel, which maintains that it had previously warned the United States against aggression, will continue to defend itself if necessary: ​​”This is not just an Israeli problem, it is a global problem,” he said.

The Houthi offensive, which surprisingly bypassed Israeli anti-aircraft defenses on Friday, “violates international legitimacy and increases instability in the Middle East,” Shoshani said, without confirming whether it was the first time Israel has bombed Yemen during the current war. “It was an Israeli airstrike,” he stressed, without giving details on whether there has been possible coordination with other countries, such as the United States or the United Kingdom, which have been facing the Yemeni guerrillas in recent months. The White House has pointed out that its forces are not involved in this Saturday’s attacks.

The current escalation represents 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 first moment. Indeed, he decided to respond in a matter of hours. “Recently, Israeli army combat aircraft attacked military targets of the Houthi terrorist regime in Yemen’s Hodeida port area in response to hundreds of attacks carried out against the State of Israel in recent months,” he explained in a statement to the army.

Hodeida is located in eastern Yemen and on the Red Sea coast, from where the Houthis have launched drones and projectiles to attack several merchant ships in recent months, causing significant damage to the Suez Canal, one of the world’s major sea routes. The Houthi militia has controlled northwest Yemen, including the capital Sanaa, for nearly a decade.

In the early hours of Friday, one person was killed when a drone hit a building in Tel Aviv, in an unprecedented attack during the current war. According to the Israeli military, it was a device launched by the Houthis that reached Israeli territory without being intercepted by Israeli anti-aircraft systems and flew at least 1,700 kilometers.

“Human Error”

Senior political, military and Israeli secret service officials held various meetings on Friday in which they analyzed the attack with the unmanned device, the security failures – attributed, in principle, to “human error” – and the possible consequences that could arise in the conflict. They did not explicitly announce a retaliation like the one launched this Saturday.

The Israeli military believes the drone was an Iranian-made, improved Samad-3 model capable of reaching Tel Aviv, nearly 2,000 kilometers from Yemen, and also capable of evading the anti-aircraft system known as Iron Dome, one of the crown jewels of the Jewish state’s defense.

The Houthis, a guerrilla group backed by Iran like the Palestinians of Hamas or the Lebanese of Hezbollah, named the drone after the historic Palestinian city of Yafa, just south of Tel Aviv. In a statement they published

On April 13, Iran launched an attack against Israel with nearly 200 drones and missiles, causing no casualties, raising fears of an escalation of the conflict in the region. The Israeli military responded with limited-intensity bombing six days later.

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