One person was killed before dawn Friday in an explosion in central Tel Aviv that appeared to be the result of an airstrike, at 287e day of the war between Israel and Hamas.
If the airstrike is confirmed, it would be the first war-related attack to cause casualties in Tel Aviv since a rocket attack claimed by the Palestinian Islamist movement from the Gaza Strip that injured one person on May 26.
On Telegram, the spokesman for the Houthi rebels in Yemen, Yahya Saree, whose movement has claimed responsibility for several missile launches in support of Hamas towards Israel since the start of the war, announced the publication “in the coming hours” of an “important statement” about a “military operation […] targeting “Tel Aviv” in occupied Palestine.
Israeli police said they received hundreds of reports “around 3:00 a.m. local time” about a loud explosion.
It hit a building near the intersection of Ben-Yehuda Avenue and Shalom-Aleichem Street, not far from an annex building of the United States embassy in Israel, according to an AFP journalist who saw broken windows.
During the search operations, a fifty-year-old was “found dead in his apartment”, the police said, specifying that he had been hit by shrapnel.
Magen David Adom, Israel’s equivalent of the Red Cross, said in a statement that it had treated four injured people, a man and a woman injured in their home, and two others injured in the street. All four were evacuated conscious to a hospital with “relatively minor” injuries.
“It may have been an airborne explosion […] “We were very lucky,” said Peretz Amar, Tel Aviv police commander at the scene, adding that “the investigation is ongoing.”
“Everything shook”
A resident of central Tel Aviv told AFP that he was woken up by a loud explosion: “Everything shook,” he said.
“No sirens [d’alerte] “The incident did not sound,” the army said in a statement, adding that “the incident [faisait] “under thorough examination” and that the explosion had been “caused by the fall of an aerial target” according to a “preliminary investigation”.
“The air force has increased its air patrols in order to protect Israeli airspace,” the text further states.
Police called on “residents to respect safety instructions and not to approach or touch debris or shrapnel that may contain explosives.”
Firefighters said they were considering the possibility that an explosive “drone” was the cause of the blast.
As of 07:20 local time, the Israeli government had not yet officially responded to the events.
On Thursday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Israeli troops in Rafah, a town in the southern Gaza Strip on the border with Egypt where the army has been conducting a major offensive since the beginning of May. There, he praised Israel’s military pressure, which he said is “taking Hamas by the throat.”
The war was triggered on October 7 by a surprise attack by Hamas that resulted in the deaths of 1,195 people on the Israeli side, mostly civilians, according to an AFP count based on official Israeli data.
Israel’s retaliatory military campaign in the Gaza Strip has devastated the small territory and has so far killed 38,848 people, mostly civilians, according to data from the Hamas-run Gaza government’s health ministry.