Israeli aircraft attacked Sanaa, the capital of Yemen, for the first time this Thursday morning, in retaliation for the impact of a ballistic missile launched hours earlier by the Houthis, a Yemeni Shiite militia allied with Iran, in the metropolitan area of Tel Aviv without causing personal injury. The aerial bombardment has targeted port facilities and power plants in the capital and other cities that the Israeli Armed Forces consider to be for military use. Yemeni media have reported the presence of at least nine fatalities in Sanaa, which has suffered successive blackouts.
The Israeli Minister of Defense, Israel Katz, has warned the Houthis through a biblical echo statement spread through the X network: “Whoever raises his hand against Israel will have his hand cut off; Whoever attacks us will be attacked seven times stronger. “Israel’s long hand will also reach the Houthi leaders.” Seven of the fatalities from the bombing were recorded in the port of Salif and the other two in the Rass Issa hydrocarbon facilities, in the western province of Hodeida. In Sanaa, the attacks affected two power plants located in the north of the capital.
The pro-Iranian militia has in turn assured that the firing of the missile against Israel occurred simultaneously with the incursion of the Israeli aircraft. The Houthis have launched repeated ballistic rocket attacks against Israel, in solidarity with the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
For more than a year, the Yemeni Shiite militia has unleashed dozens of missile and drone operations against Israel. The anti-bombing alarm sirens were activated on the night of Wednesday to Thursday in the central region of Israel due to the firing of at least one ballistic missile. The projectile, a Palestine 2 type hypersonic missile, was intercepted by the Israeli defense shield, according to a military spokesman, but the fall of its remains caused the destruction of a school in Ramat Efal, on the outskirts of Tel Aviv.
Following the recent fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria and the weakening and elimination of Hezbollah leaders in Lebanon as a result of Israeli military operations in recent weeks, Yemen’s Houthi militia has confirmed itself as the main ally. active military of the Iran rejection front against Israel. After 16 months of war that devastated the Gaza Strip and caused more than 45,000 deaths, Hamas also seems to be looking for a way out, through the release of the Israeli hostages it captured on October 7 of last year, to end the conflict.
The Huthi militia – or Ansar Allá (Supporters of God), its real name – controls 30% of the territory of Yemen, which concentrates 70% of the population, where it has imposed a fundamentalist regime. Since October last year, it has opened a “third front” against Israel, in addition to Gaza and Lebanon. Hundreds of armed actions aimed at disrupting navigation in the Red Sea, one of the main trade routes in the world, have given it international notoriety, having reduced the circulation of merchant ships in that sea route by 75%. The deployment of naval forces to the region, especially the United States, and US bombings against Houthi targets in Yemen have limited the scope of their attacks. Last Monday they destroyed precisely one of the main command and control centers operated by the Houthis.
