Israel said Saturday that it had carried out airstrikes on a port city in Yemen controlled by the Houthi militant group, in an attack that sparked massive fires and caused deaths and injuries, the Israel Defense Forces and the Houthi-run Masirah news channel said.
A brief IDF statement Saturday said that its jets had struck “military targets of the Houthi terrorist regime” in the port of the city, Al-Hodeida, in response to “hundreds of attacks” carried out against Israel in recent months. The Hodeida strikes were approved at a rare Saturday Sabbath emergency cabinet meeting called in the afternoon, according to Israeli media reports.
The United States and Britain have been carrying out airstrikes in Yemen for months, in an unsuccessful bid to end Houthi attacks on maritime traffic in the Red Sea. Israel’s attack Saturday heralded a further expansion of the war in Gaza, and added a volatile new dynamic to what has become a building regional conflict.
GET CAUGHT UP
Stories to keep you informed
The Houthis have framed their attacks, many on commercial ships in the Red Sea, as aimed at ending Israel’s offensive in Gaza. Mohammed Abdulsalam, a Houthi spokesman, writing on X, said the strikes Saturday “will not deter the Yemeni people or its brave armed forces, but only increase their determination and steadfastness in supporting Gaza.”
The Israeli attacks, he added, had targeted “civilian facilities, oil depots and the electricity station” in Hodeida, an impoverished city that serves as a lifeline for imports to northern Yemen, as well as a critical source of revenue for the Houthis, a militant group from northern Yemen that has taken control of large swaths of the country during a civil war that started a decade ago.
Footage of the aftermath of Saturday’s strikes showed black smoke billowing from massive fires in the port, and residents in Hodeida bathed in an orange glow as they watched. Al-Masirah quoted the Ministry of Health as saying that the strikes had caused an unspecified number of deaths and injuries and that a number of people were “severely burned” as result of the attacks. The channel aired footage from what appeared to be a hospital, of injured people on gurneys lining a hallway.
