Aziz Ahmadi
14 January 2025•Update: 14 January 2025
SANAA, Yemen
The Yemeni Houthi group said late Tuesday that it had carried out new attacks on targets in central and southern Israel, including Tel Aviv and Eilat.
In a recorded statement, Houthi military spokesperson Yahya Saree claimed that the group's drone forces launched a “special military operation” targeting unspecified Israeli sites in “the occupied Jaffa area (Tel Aviv).”
He added that “a second operation used a cruise missile to strike a power station in the Umm Rashrash (Eilat) area.”
According to Saree, both operations “successfully hit their targets.”
Earlier Tuesday, the Houthis also claimed responsibility for striking Israel’s Ministry of Defense in Tel Aviv with a hypersonic ballistic missile, adding that Israeli interception systems failed to neutralize it.
However, the Israeli military claimed in a statement that the missile was intercepted before it entered Israeli airspace. The Magen David Adom emergency service reported that 11 people were injured while rushing to shelters during the interception, and four more suffered panic attacks.
These developments come amid reports of progress in negotiations for a potential cease-fire and prisoner exchange deal between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.
The Houthis, in solidarity with Gaza, which has been facing a genocidal Israeli war since October 2023, have targeted Israeli cargo ships or ones linked with Tel Aviv in the Red Sea with missiles and drones, vowing to continue until the attacks on the enclave end.
Since the beginning of 2024, a coalition led by the US has been carrying out airstrikes that it said target Houthi locations in Yemen in response to the group’s Red Sea attacks. They have been occasionally met with retaliation from the Houthis.
With the intervention of Washington and London and escalating tensions, the Houthis announced that they consider all American and British ships military targets.
*Writing by Mohammad Sio
