The Houthi terrorist group on May 4 fired a missile toward Israel that landed near Ben Gurion Airport, the country’s main international airport, sending a plume of smoke into the air and causing panic in the terminal building.
The Houthis, who are aligned with Iran and based in Yemen, claimed responsibility for the strike. Recently, the group has ramped up missile attacks on Israel, citing solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza, which is controlled by the Iran-aligned Hamas terrorist group.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised to retaliate.
“We attacked in the past; we will attack in the future,” he said in a video published by his office.
Yair Hetzroni, a senior Israeli police commander, showed reporters a crater created by the missile’s impact. Airport authorities said it landed beside a road near a Terminal 3 parking lot.
“You can see the scene right behind us here, a hole that opened up with a diameter of tens of metres and also tens of meters deep,” Hetzroni said.
He added that there was no significant damage.
Netanyahu plans to meet with security ministers and defense officials on May 4 to formulate a response, Israel’s Channel 12 News reported.
Aside from a drone strike that hit Tel Aviv in 2024, Israel’s missile defense systems have intercepted the vast majority of attacks from Yemen. The missile on May 4 was the only strike among several launched over the past few days that Israel failed to intercept.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it would investigate.
“Today, at approximately 9:18 a.m., the IDF identified the launch of a missile from Yemen toward Israeli territory. According to protocol, sirens were sounded in a number of areas in Israel,” the IDF said.
“Several attempts were made to intercept the missile. A hit was identified in the area of Ben Gurion Airport.”
A reporter at the airport saw passengers running toward safe rooms as sirens blared.
Smartphone videos showed a plume of black smoke rising behind parked aircraft and airport buildings. Pictures showed a nearby road littered with dust and debris.
Eight people were sent to the hospital for mild to moderate injuries, according to the Israeli ambulance service.
Houthi spokesperson Yahya Saree said Israel’s main airport was “no longer safe for air travel.”
After reports that air traffic was halted and access routes to the airport were blocked, the Israel Airports Authority said operations had returned to normal.
Multiple airlines, including Delta, Lufthansa, ITA Airways, and Air France, said that they had canceled flights entering and leaving Tel Aviv. Several had been scheduled for May 5 or May 6.
The airstrike followed reports of Israeli ministers nearing a sign-off on plans to increase military operations in Gaza that resumed in March after a two-month ceasefire.
There have been efforts to revive the truce between Israel and Hamas, but they have failed to manifest. In March, U.S. President Donald Trump ordered widespread strikes against Houthi terrorists, which killed hundreds in Yemen, to limit the group’s military capacity and deter it from threatening commercial shipping in the Red Sea.
Controlling large areas of Yemen, the Houthis began targeting Red Sea commerce and Israel in late 2023, shortly after war broke out between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
Hamas’s large-scale assault on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages, triggered the war. Israel’s retaliatory campaign has led to 52,000 deaths in Gaza, according to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilian and terrorist casualties, and has left much of the territory destroyed.
