A missile fired by Yemen’s Houthi rebels towards Israel on Sunday landed near Ben Gurion Airport, the country’s main international airport, sending a plume of smoke into the air and causing panic among passengers in the terminal building.
A senior Israeli police commander, Yair Hetzroni, showed reporters a crater caused by the impact of the missile, which airport authorities said had 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 metres deep,” Hetzroni said, adding that there was no significant damage.
In a statement after the strike, Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz said: “Whoever harms us will be harmed sevenfold.”
Sirens were activated across central Israel in the minutes before it fell, including nearby in the major city of Tel Aviv.
The airport, which is located between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, heard sirens and saw passengers reacting by running towards safe rooms.
The Israeli ambulance service said eight people were being taken to the hospital, including a man in a mild to moderate condition with injuries to his limbs and two women in a mild condition with head injuries.
A spokesperson for the Israel Airports Authority said takeoffs and landings had resumed and operations at Ben Gurion had returned to normal, after reports of air traffic being halted and access routes to the airport being blocked.
However, flight operations were disrupted due to the missile, according to Ben Gurion’s live air traffic site.
Some flights, including those by Air India, TUS Airways and Lufthansa Group, were cancelled. Others, including to U.S. airports Newark and JFK, were delayed by about 90 minutes. A Reuters reporter boarded a flight to Dubai that was running on time.
Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthis, who claimed responsibility for the missile strike, have recently intensified missile launches at Israel, saying they are acting in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza.
Claiming responsibility for the strike, the Houthis’ military spokesperson, Yahya Saree, reiterated a warning to airlines that the Israeli airport was “no longer safe for air travel”.
