Houthis claim to have attacked Tel Aviv with ‘new hypersonic’ ballistic missile 

Responders put out a fire in the area of Lod, near Tel Aviv, in central Israel on September 15, 2024. The Israeli military said a missile fired from Yemen crossed into central Israel on September 15 and "fell in an open area". (AFP)
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Updated 15 September 2024
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Houthis claim to have attacked Tel Aviv with ‘new hypersonic’ ballistic missile 

  • Air raid sirens had sounded in Tel Aviv and across central Israel, sending residents running for shelters

AL-MUKALLA: Yemen’s Houthi militia claims to have fired a ballistic missile at the capital of Israel and vowed to continue firing rockets at Israel as well as attacking its ships in support of the Palestinian people.

In a televised statement, Houthi military spokesman Yahya Sarea said on Sunday that Houthi forces fired a hypersonic missile at a military location in Tel Aviv, which traveled 2,040 kilometers and evaded US and Israeli air defenses.

“The Israeli enemy should expect more strikes and qualitative operations to come,” Sarea said, adding that the attack on Tel Aviv was also retaliation for Israel’s airstrikes on Yemen’s western city of Hodeidah on July 20.

Thousands of Israelis rushed to shelters in Tel Aviv on Sunday, and large explosions rocked the city as Israeli defenses tried to intercept a Houthi missile that landed in the city center.

After the Houthi rocket attack, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu threatened to launch a new wave of strikes on Yemen, similar to the attacks on Hodeidah.

“The Houthis should have known by now that we are charging a heavy price for any attempt to harm us. Those who need a reminder — are welcome to visit Hodeida port,” Netanyahu said at his Cabinet meeting.

Speaking to large crowds of followers in areas under his control, Houthi leader Abdul Malik Al-Houthi also vowed on Sunday to continue the campaign against international ships in the Red Sea and other waters, as well as firing missiles at Israel until it ends its war in Gaza.

“Our forces continue their successful and highly effective sea operations against ships linked to the Israeli, American and British adversaries,” Al-Houthi said.

Since November, the Houthis have fired more than 100 ballistic missiles, drones and drone boats at commercial and navy ships in international shipping lanes, as well as rockets and drones at Israel, claiming that they are acting in support of the Palestinian people.

Critics say the Houthis are using Yemen’s widespread outrage over Israel’s devastating operation in Gaza to recruit fighters, boost their dwindling public support, and mobilize forces to attack opponents in Yemen.

Meanwhile, the EU naval mission in the Red Sea, known as EUNAVFOR Aspides, said on Sunday that the salvage operation of the burning oil tanker Sounion is underway, raising hopes of averting a disaster for the Red Sea ecosystem and shipping.

“The salvage of the MV Sounion is a complex operation and consists of various phases. The tugboats have successfully connected to the vessel and the towing of the MV Sounion to a safe location is in progress,” the EU mission said on X, adding that its navy ships are providing protection to rescue vessels.

The Sounion, carrying nearly a million barrels of crude oil, has been burning and deserted in the Red Sea since late last month, after being repeatedly attacked by the Houthis.

The EU mission said earlier this month that the tugboats that arrived at the site of the burning oil tanker discovered that the ship was too dangerous to be moved to another location to neutralise the threat, forcing rescuers to consider other options.

On Sunday, a government official in Aden, the interim capital of Yemen, told Arab News that the rescuers were able to tow the ship after the arrival of a new tugboat sent by the Sounion’s owner.

Marine experts, who had previously warned of a major environmental disaster in the Red Sea if the ship exploded or leaked oil, reacted positively to the news of the towing.

“With naval protection around it, the MV Sounion is now being towed to a safe location for salvaging, that would prevent an environmental disaster in the Red Sea after the ship was rigged with explosives by the Houthis and burning for weeks,” Wim Zwijnenburg of the Humanitarian Disarmament Project at the Dutch peace organization PAX said in a post on X.

Meanwhile, a Yemeni government officer was killed on Sunday in clashes with the Houthis in the southern province of Dhale, the latest in a series of Houthi attacks on government troops in the province.

Mohammed Al-Naqeeb, a military spokesperson for the Southern Transitional Council, told Arab News that the Houthis used drones and thermal missiles to attack their forces in Dhale’s Qatabah district on Sunday, sparking clashes that killed field commander Mohammed Ali Al-Humaidi.

Dozens of Yemeni government troops have been killed in Houthi attacks in Dhale, Marib, Taiz, and other contested areas during the past two years, despite a significant drop in hostilities since a UN-brokered truce went into effect in 2022. 


Israeli strike hits car factory in Syria: monitor

An Israeli strike in Syria on Sunday targeted trucks transporting aid for Lebanese people. (File/AFP)
Updated 58 min ago
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Israeli strike hits car factory in Syria: monitor

  • Israeli aircraft launched “air strikes with three missiles targeting... three trucks loaded with food and medical supplies inside an Iranian car factory,” the monitor said

BEIRUT: An Israeli strike in Syria on Sunday targeted trucks transporting aid for Lebanese people, wounding three aid workers, a war monitor said, the latest such attack on the country.
Israeli aircraft launched “air strikes with three missiles targeting... three trucks loaded with food and medical supplies inside an Iranian car factory... in southern Homs,” said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
The attack destroyed the trucks and wounded three aid workers, said the British-based monitor with a network of sources inside Syria.
“The trucks crossed over from Iraq to provide humanitarian aid to Lebanese people” affected by intensifying Israeli strikes, it added.
On Friday, Lebanon said an Israeli air strike on the Syrian border cut off the main international road linking the two countries.
Israel has repeatedly targeted the border area in recent days because it says Hezbollah is bringing in weapons across the border from ally Syria.
Israel has carried out hundreds of strikes in Syria since the start of country’s civil war in 2011, mainly targeting army positions and Iran-backed fighters, including those of Hezbollah.
Israeli authorities rarely comment on individual strikes but have said repeatedly they will not allow arch-enemy Iran to expand its presence in Syria.


Iran’s Khamenei decorates commander for Israel attack

Updated 06 October 2024
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Iran’s Khamenei decorates commander for Israel attack

  • The decoration was bestowed because of “the brilliant ‘Honest Promise’ operation”

TEHRAN: Iran’s supreme leader has decorated the Revolutionary Guards aerospace commander for the Islamic republic’s missile attacks on arch-foe Israel, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s website said on Sunday.
“Ayatollah Khamenei presented the Order of Fath (“Conquest” in Farsi) to General Amirali Hajjizadeh, commander of the Guards Aerospace Force,” it said.
The decoration was bestowed because of “the brilliant ‘Honest Promise’ operation,” the website said.
Hajjizadeh, 62, has headed the Guards aerospace unit since its creation in 2009.
On Tuesday, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) fired some 200 missiles at Israel in retaliation for an Israeli air strike that killed Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah and IRGC top general Abbas Nilforoushan in Beirut.
It was Iran’s second direct attack on Israel in six months, after a missile and drone assault in April in retaliation for a deadly strike on Iran’s consulate in Damascus, which Tehran blamed on Israel.
Israel has vowed to respond after Tuesday’s Iranian missile attack.


One killed in shooting attack in southern Israel

Updated 53 min 28 sec ago
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One killed in shooting attack in southern Israel

  • Seriously injured woman was being treated at the scene while eight other people were injured in the attack

JERUSALEM: At least one person was killed and 10 others injured Sunday during a shooting in southern Israel’s Beer Sheva, police and emergency responders said, a day before the first anniversary of the October 7 Hamas attack.
“Paramedics have pronounced a 25-year-old female deceased, and are evacuating 10 casualties,” emergency service provider Magen David Adom said in a statement.
Police said the incident was being treated as a “suspected terrorist attack.”
“A short time ago a report was received at the police headquarters about a suspected shooting incident at the central station in Beer Sheva,” said a police spokesman in a statement.
“A number of injured on the scene. The terrorist was neutralized at the scene and many police forces of the southern district are at the scene,” the statement added.
The incident comes just days after a Hamas-claimed shooting attack last week in which seven people were killed in Israel’s commercial hub of Tel Aviv.
The Tel Aviv attack — one of the deadliest in the country since the October 7 Hamas attack — came as Iran fired about 200 missiles at Israel, sending hundreds of thousands of people into public shelters.
Israel and Hamas have been at war in Gaza since the October 7 attack on Israel that resulted in the deaths of 1,205 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
Israel’s retaliatory military campaign has killed at least 41,870 people in Gaza, the majority of them civilians, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry. The United Nations has said the figures are reliable.


Desperate deja vu for foreign war doctors in Lebanon

Updated 06 October 2024
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Desperate deja vu for foreign war doctors in Lebanon

Beirut: In a south Lebanon hospital, Norwegian doctor Mads Gilbert peered out of the window after bombardment near the Israeli border, four decades after he first worked in the country.
“It’s a horrible experience,” he said in a video call from the southern town of Nabatiyeh.
“It’s been 42 years and nothing has changed,” said Gilbert, who first saw war treating patients during the 1982 Israeli invasion and siege of Beirut.
Below the window paramedics were on standby next to parked ambulances at the hospital behind the front line.
The anaesthetist and emergency medicine specialist said he had seen just a few cases since arriving on Tuesday.
“Most of the cases have been south of us and they have not been able to evacuate them because the attacks have been so vicious,” Gilbert said.
Israel has increased its air strikes against Lebanese militant group Hezbollah since September 23, pounding the south of the country and later staging what it called “limited operations” across the border.
On Thursday the Israeli army warned residents to leave Nabatiyeh.
The escalation has killed more than 1,100 people and wounded at least another 3,600, and pushed upwards of a million people to flee their homes, according to government figures.
Official media have reported some Israeli strikes killing entire families, and AFP has spoken to two people who lost 17 relatives and 10 family members respectively.
Israel’s military “can do whatever they want to health care, to ambulances, to churches, to mosques, to universities, as they’ve been doing in Gaza,” said Gilbert, who has repeatedly volunteered in the Palestinian territory during past conflicts.
“And now we see the same repeat itself in Lebanon in 2024.”
A hospital in the town of Bint Jbeil closer to the border on Saturday said it was hit by heavy overnight Israeli strikes, wounding nine medical and nursing staff, most seriously.
At least four hospitals said they had suspended work amid ongoing Israeli bombardment on Friday, and Hezbollah-affiliated paramedics said 11 personnel were killed in Israeli raids in south Lebanon.
On Thursday, Lebanon’s health minister said more than 40 paramedics and firefighters had been killed by Israeli fire in three days.
UN official Imran Riza on X on Saturday spoke of “an alarming increase in attacks against health care in Lebanon.”
Britain said reports that Israeli strikes had hit “health facilities and support personnel” in Lebanon were “deeply disturbing.”
Israel has claimed Hezbollah uses ambulances for “terrorist purposes.”
In the capital Beirut, British-Palestinian doctor Ghassan Abu-Sittah said he also saw parallels with the conflict in Gaza.
Abu-Sittah has tirelessly campaigned for “justice” since spending weeks in the besieged Palestinian territory treating the wounded at the start of the war.
Now in Lebanon, the plastic and reconstructive surgeon described seeing “kids, families whose houses have been targeted” with blast injuries in the past few weeks.
There were “kids with blast injuries to the face, to the torso, amputated limbs,” he said outside the American University of Beirut’s Medical Center.
Abu-Sittah estimated that more than a quarter of the wounded he had seen in Beirut and other parts of Lebanon were minors.
“I have a girl upstairs who is 13, who had a blast injury to the face, needed reconstruction of her jaw, will need several surgeries,” he said.
“Children who are injured in war need between eight and 12 surgeries by the time they’re adult age.”
According to the UN children’s agency UNICEF, 690 children in Lebanon have been wounded in recent weeks.
It said doctors had reported most suffered from “concussions and traumatic brain injuries from the impact of blasts, shrapnel wounds and limb injuries.”
“It’s just so reminiscent of what was happening in Gaza,” said Abu-Sittah.
“The heartbreaking thing is that this could all have been stopped if they stopped the war in Gaza,” he added.


Israeli strikes batter Beirut in heaviest bombardment so far

Updated 06 October 2024
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Israeli strikes batter Beirut in heaviest bombardment so far

  • Heavy strikes shake southern Beirut
  • Israel says it made ‘targeted strikes’ on Hezbollah storage facilities, infrastructure

BEIRUT: Israeli air attacks battered Beirut’s southern suburbs overnight and early on Sunday, the most intense bombardment of the Lebanese capital since Israel sharply escalated its campaign against Iran-backed group Hezbollah last month.
During the night, the blasts sent booms across Beirut and sparked flashes of red and white for nearly 30 minutes visible from several kilometers away.
It was the single biggest attack of Israel’s assault on Beirut so far, witnesses and military analysts on local TV channels said.
On Sunday a grey haze hung over the city and rubble was strewn across streets in the southern suburbs, while smoke columns rose over the area.
“Last night was the most violence of all the previous nights. Buildings were shaking around us and at first I thought it was an earthquake. There were dozens of strikes — we couldn’t count them all — and the sounds were deafening,” said Hanan Abdullah, a resident of the Burj Al-Barajneh area in Beirut’s southern suburbs.
Videos posted on social media, which Reuters could not immediately verify, showed fresh damage to the highway that runs from Beirut airport through its southern suburbs into downtown.
Israel said its air force had “conducted a series of targeted strikes on a number of weapons storage facilities and terrorist infrastructure sites belonging to the Hezbollah terrorist organization in the area of Beirut.”
Lebanese authorities did not immediately say what the missiles had hit or what damage they caused.
This weekend’s intense bombardment came just ahead of the anniversary of the Oct. 7 attack by Palestinian militant group Hamas on southern Israel in which some 1,200 people were killed and more than 250 taken hostage, according to Israeli figures.
The target of Israel’s airstrikes across Lebanon and its ground invasion in the south of the country is the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah, Iran’s chief ally in the region. The assault has killed hundreds of people including civilians and has displaced 1.2 million, Lebanese officials say.
For days Israel has bombed the Beirut suburb of Dahiyeh — considered a stronghold for Hezbollah but also home to thousands of ordinary Lebanese, Palestinian and Syrian refugees — killing its leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah on Sept. 27.
A Lebanese security source said on Saturday that Hashem Safieddine, Nasrallah’s potential successor, had been out of contact since Friday, after an Israeli airstrike on Thursday near the city’s international airport that was reported to have targeted him.
Israel continues to bomb the area of the strike, preventing rescue workers from reaching it, Lebanese security sources said.
Hezbollah has not commented on Safieddine.
His loss would be another blow to the group and its patron Iran. Israeli strikes across the region in the past year, sharply accelerated in recent weeks, have devastated Hezbollah’s leadership.

Gaza war
Israel’s war in Gaza, launched after the Oct. 7 attacks and aimed at eliminating Hamas, another Iran-backed group, has killed nearly 42,000 people, Palestinian authorities say. The coastal enclave lies in ruins.
At least 26 people were killed and 93 others wounded when Israeli airstrikes hit a mosque and a school sheltering displaced people in the Gaza Strip early on Sunday, the Hamas-run Gaza government media office said.
Hezbollah began firing rockets at Israel a day after the Oct. 7 attacks and after Israel had begun bombing Gaza, saying it was acting in solidarity with the Palestinian group.
Cross-border fire continued between Israel and Hezbollah for months, but were mostly limited to the Israel-Lebanon border area before the recent upsurge.
Israel says it stepped up its assault on Hezbollah last month to enable the safe return of tens of thousands of citizens to homes in northern Israel, bombarded by the group since last Oct. 8.
Israeli authorities said on Saturday that nine Israeli soldiers had been killed in southern Lebanon so far.
In northern Israel, air raid sirens sounded on Sunday and the Israeli military said it had intercepted rockets fired from Lebanese territory.
Iran has signalled it does not want a direct war with Israel but has launched responses on occasion to Israeli attacks. It fired a barrage of ballistic missiles at Israel on Tuesday that did little damage.
Israel has been weighing options for its response.