It was 3.12am on Friday morning in Israel when the sound of a drone engine coming from the Mediterranean coast advanced towards the urban area of Tel Aviv, a highly protected city. There are even recordings posted on social media of videos captured by people who were at the beach at that time that allow us to see how the aircraft advances in the middle of the night towards the city. Seconds later, the flash of the explosion is heard and seen after hitting a block of flats, causing one death, a man around 50 years old, and eight minor injuries. After numerous attempts by the Houthi guerrilla in Yemen in the current war, a device of this type has bypassed the controls in Israeli airspace and has not been shot down. An investigation is already underway by the Israeli authorities.
The Jewish state, with several war fronts already open, especially in Gaza and on the border with Lebanon, now has a new concern, as the guerrilla group, which has claimed responsibility for the attack, says it will continue its offensive on Tel Aviv, which it has struck for the first time in this war. This means that this group, supported by Iran, like Hamas in Palestine and the Hezbollah guerrilla group in Lebanon, has managed to broaden the range of its threat and extend the range of its bombings. The Israeli army, after an initial analysis, believes that improvements have been made to the Iranian-made Samad-3 drone model, which has been able to fly from Yemen to Tel Aviv, around 2,000 kilometres away. The mayor of Israel’s economic capital, Ron Huldai, has raised the alert level.
The Iron Dome system presides over Israel’s highly sophisticated anti-aircraft defense system, whose territory is under permanent threat, especially from the armed Palestinian resistance in Gaza. But this time it failed to intercept the drone. Israel blames it on “human error.” The sky, according to the available images, was not filled with the orange tracers that usually cross it every time a threat arises and to which citizens are so accustomed. Nor did the alarms go off, as they are activated several times a day in different regions since the current war broke out on October 7. However, this was the case with another unprecedented attack three months ago, the one launched by Iran, which left no fatalities.
The incident was immediately considered important and reported to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who followed the developments in real time, his office said. On Friday, the president met with senior security officials in the country to analyze what happened. Indeed, it was not just any attack. The remains of the plane surrounded a central area a couple of minutes walk from the headquarters of the US consulate.
High-level meetings are discussing the failures and how to stop them in order to prevent them from happening again. Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has chaired a meeting in which he discussed, together with military and secret service commanders, additional efforts to improve anti-aircraft defenses. “The year 2024 is marked by war: we must be prepared for all scenarios on all fronts,” the minister said, according to a statement released by his office. “We must be prepared for defensive and offensive actions,” he added.
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“Important challenge”
“So far, dozens of unmanned aerial vehicles have been launched from Yemen. Most were intercepted or shot down while en route or before they infiltrated Israeli territory,” said Daniel Hagari, an army spokesman. “Most of them were intercepted by American forces” and “the rest were intercepted by Israeli Air Force aircraft or defensive systems,” he added in a video statement in which he reported that another drone had been shot down in the early hours of Friday. Israel, the military spokesman said, is attacked “daily” by drones launched by Hezbollah from Lebanon. This is “a significant challenge due to the short-range launches, which is different from what we experienced last night,” he acknowledged.
Hamas, which congratulated the Houthis for their attack, did indeed hit Tel Aviv and its surroundings several times at the beginning of the current war, barely fifty kilometres from Gaza. For its part, Hezbollah has only hit the city of Haifa, Israel’s third largest city, about thirty kilometres as the crow flies from the border with Lebanon. Hence the uproar raised by the Houthis.
The drone had to fly for several hours to reach its target, and it did not arrive at Tel Aviv from the south or the east, which was the most logical route, but from the sea in the west. Never before has this group managed to get so far during a conflict that is now in its tenth month and in which they have attacked dozens of ships in the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea, and have caused a collapse in maritime traffic in the Suez Canal, in a show of solidarity with Hamas. They have also carried out missile and drone attacks against Israeli territory, but until now they had not gone beyond the area around the city of Eilat, in the far south of the country. But in the early hours of Friday they have gone one step further.
“After our initial investigation, it is likely that (the drone used in the attack) was a Samad-3, which we believe may have flown from Yemen to Tel Aviv. The Samad-3 is an Iranian weapon that has probably been upgraded to extend its flight range,” explained Daniel Hagari, who sees the direct hand of the Iranian enemy behind what happened.
The Houthi militia, which controls northwestern Yemen, including the capital Sanaa, has issued a statement calling the attack, carried out in solidarity with the Palestinians, a “success” and warning that it is declaring the Tel Aviv area an unsafe area, according to a post on the social network X (formerly Twitter). The sources added that the aircraft used is capable of bypassing Israeli anti-aircraft security and has been christened Yafa, the same name as the historic Palestinian city on the Mediterranean coast now neighbouring Tel Aviv.
From this point on, we will “examine the incident, understand exactly where the threat was launched from, what are the necessary defensive responses and what are the necessary operational responses against those who threaten the State of Israel,” Hagari concluded.
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