A missile fired by Yemen Houthis rebels to Israel landed on Sunday near Ben Gurion airport, the country’s main international airport, sending a plume of smoke in the air and causing panic among the passengers of the terminal.
The Houthis lined up by Iran of Yemen, who claimed the responsibility of the missile strike, recently intensified missile launches in Israel, saying that they act in solidarity with the Palestinians in Gaza.
An Israeli police speaker Yair Hetzroni showed journalists a crater caused by the impact of the missile, which, according to the airport authorities, landed next to a road near a parking lot of Terminal 3.
“You can see the scene just behind us here, a hole that has opened with a diameter of tens of meters and also tens of meters deep,” said Hetzroni, adding that there was no significant damage.
In a statement after the strike, the Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said: “Whoever hurts us will be damaged.”
Israel Channel 12 News said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would meet the security ministers and defense officials on Sunday to discuss an answer.
Most missile launches from Yemen have been intercepted by Israeli anti -missile defense systems, with the exception of a strike that hit the big city in Tel Aviv last year.
The army said that it was investigating what had happened with the launch of Sunday, which caused the sirens to activate in the center of Israel, including near Aviv.
A reuters journalist at the airport, which is located between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, heard sirens and saw passengers react to safe rooms.
Several people from the airport have published videos filmed on mobile phones that showed a clearly visible black smoke plume nearby planes and airport buildings. Reuters did not check the videos.
The Israeli ambulance service said that eight people were being transported to hospital, including a man in a light to moderate state with injuries to members and two women in a light state with head injuries.
American knocks on the Houthis
By claiming the responsibility of the strike, the military spokesperson for the Houthis, Yahya Saree, said that the main airport of Israel was “no longer for plane trips”.
A spokesperson for the Israeli airport authority said that takeoff and landings had resumed and that Ben-Gurion’s operations had returned to normal, after air traffic reports were interrupted and access the access roads to blocked airport.
However, flight operations were disrupted due to the missile, according to the live air traffic site from Ben Gurion.
Some flights, notably by Air India, Tus Airways and Lufthansa Group, have been canceled. Others, including Newark American airports in New Jersey and JFK in New York, were delayed by around 90 minutes. A Reuters journalist rose aboard a flight for Dubai who was on time.
Sunday’s strike came while the Israeli ministers would have been about to sign plans to extend the military operation to Gaza, which resumed in March following a two -month truce, drawing a commitment from the Houthis to strike Israel with more missiles.
Efforts to relaunch the ceasefire have so far failed, and American president Donald Trump in March has ordered large-scale strikes against Houthis to reduce their capacities and dissuade them from targeting commercial navigation in the Red Sea.
The Houthis, who control the bands of Yemen, began to target Israel and the Red Sea Bride at the start of the war between Hamas and Israel in the Gaza Strip.
The war was triggered by attacks led by Hamas against southern Israel on October 7, 2023, during which some 1,200 people were killed and 251 hostages, according to Israeli accounts. The offensive of Israel on Gaza killed more than 50,000 Palestinians and destroys a large part of the enclave, according to the Palestinian health authorities.
The United States hit the rebel group, which killed hundreds of people in Yemen, were the largest American military operation in the Middle East since Trump took office in January.
