Yemen’s hutis, the only armed group that continues to attack Israel frequently since Gaza’s invasion began a year and a half ago, they had been throwing missiles almost daily this week against the Jewish state, but they were always intercepted by anti -aircraft defenses. This Sunday, however, the shield has failed twice and one of the projectiles has impacted with a nerve center as important as the main and almost unique airport of the country, Ben Gurion, located near Tel Aviv. The missile – which, having fallen into some passenger terminal, would have foreseeably cause a massacre – has only hurt six people, almost all of mildness, according to health services. Defense minister Israel Katz has responded with a single phrase: “Whoever hurts us will hit seven times stronger.” Airlines such as Air Europa and the Lufthansa group have canceled their flights to Tel Aviv.
The moment and the consequences of the impact have been captured by both security cameras and by drivers with their mobile phones. A smoke cloud rose in the air near the airport, a huge crater was seen on the floor and the passengers panicked inside the terminal. A part of the road that leads to the highway that connects the two main cities, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, has been dyed black.
The airport only closed its doors for an hour, but airlines such as the Lufthansa group (which includes Lufthansa, Swiss, Austrian and Brussels Airlines) and Air Europa are canceling their flights for this Sunday, according to Israeli media. It is a dynamic that has been repeated since the attack of Hamas of October 7, 2023 that triggered the invasion of Gaza and the regionalization of the war: the airlines have been freezing and retaking their routes to Tel Aviv based on the expected reprisals of Iran or of the Lebanese militia Hezbollah.
Aware of the symbolism of the target, Yahya Saree, Military spokesman for the hutis – an Iran’s Rebelde Movement that controls about a third of Yemen’s territory and that broke into the conflict “in solidarity with the Gazati brothers” -, the attack has claimed. And he has warned the airlines that Ben Gurion “is no longer safe for air transport.”
The Hutí is the same militia that acquired an unusual prominence in the East next to internationalize the conflict with its harassment of merchant ships in the Red Sea. He stopped them during the two months of Alto El Fuego in Gaza, until the Israeli prime minister, Benjamín Netanyahu, blocked the entry of all food into the Palestinian enclave, last March.
On this occasion, for reasons that he still investigates, the Israeli army failed in his two attempts to interception of the Thaad and Arrow systems together with the United States, which has been helping him in the interceptions and frequently bombards Yemen from the return to the White House of Donald Trump, with more than 800 attacks since March 15. To those bombings the United Kingdom was added last Tuesday.
