Yemen’s Houthi rebels, a movement backed by Iran, claimed responsibility for a drone attack that caused an explosion that killed one person early this morning in central Tel Aviv, Israel. “The air force of drones within the Yemeni armed forces […] “The Israeli military carried out a qualitative military operation, targeting one of the important targets in the occupied area of Jaffa, known in Israel as Tel Aviv,” their military spokesman, Yahya Saree, said in a statement. This attack comes after more than nine months of war between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
Key information to remember
⇒ Israel claims “human error” after drone strike in Tel Aviv
⇒ Polio virus detected in Gaza wastewater
⇒ Benjamin Netanyahu blocks the creation of a hospital in Israel for children from Gaza
“Human error” prevented drone from being intercepted
The airstrike occurred this Friday morning at 3:12 a.m., when a drone crashed into “a residential building near the American consulate in Tel Aviv,” an Israeli military official explained during a briefing to the press. It was a “very large drone that can travel great distances,” assured this official, who does not rule out at this stage any hypothesis on its origin, after the Yemeni Houthi rebels claimed the attack in the morning.
The drone had been detected by the Israeli army but “human error” meant that the “interception and defense systems were not activated,” he added. “No alarm sounded. That’s part of what we’re investigating. No alarm sounded in Tel Aviv because it wasn’t activated,” the military official added.
Israeli raids in Lebanon: five dead including a Hezbollah commander
Israeli strikes in Lebanon killed at least five people on Thursday, including a commander of the Lebanese Hezbollah, according to a source close to the Shiite movement and a security source. “At least three people were killed and several wounded in an Israeli strike on a home near Jmaijmeh” in southern Lebanon, a Lebanese security source told AFP, without specifying whether they were civilians or fighters.
Hezbollah announced that two of its members were among the dead, including Ali Jaafar Maatouq. A source close to the Islamist movement presented him as “a commander of the Al Radwan force”, an elite unit of Hezbollah. This information was confirmed by the Israeli army, which added that it had killed “another commander responsible for the operations of the Al Radwan force” in Majdal Selm, near Jmaijmeh. However, his death was not immediately confirmed by Lebanese sources.
Polio virus detected in Gaza sewage
The presence of the virus responsible for polio has been detected in several samples of sewage from the Gaza Strip, the Hamas government’s health ministry for Gaza announced on Thursday, denouncing a “health catastrophe.” The results of tests, carried out on samples of sewage in coordination with UNICEF, [ont] “showed the presence of the polio virus,” the ministry wrote in a statement.
This detection “in the waste water which flows between the tents of the displaced […] “foreshadows a real health disaster and exposes thousands of residents to the risk of contracting” this disease, adds the ministry, which calls for “an immediate end to the Israeli aggression”. For its part, the Israeli Ministry of Health indicated in a press release that the presence of a polio virus “type 2 has been detected in samples of wastewater from the Gaza region”. This is, according to the website of the World Health Organization (WHO), from a strain considered to have been eradicated in 1999.
Netanyahu blocks Israel’s hospital for Gaza children
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has reversed an order from his defense minister to build a field hospital in Israel to treat Palestinian children from Gaza, his office said Thursday.
Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced in a statement the day before that he had ordered a “temporary” hospital to be set up in Israel to treat children from Gaza, whose illnesses cannot be treated in the war-torn Palestinian territory where the health system is exhausted. “The prime minister has cancelled the order and, for political reasons, blocked a humanitarian solution,” an Israeli official told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity.
ICJ issues opinion on Israeli occupation today
The International Court of Justice (ICJ), the highest court of the UN, will deliver an opinion this Friday at 3 p.m. on the legal consequences of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories since 1967. An unprecedented case in which some fifty States have testified.
On December 31, 2022, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution requesting a non-binding “advisory opinion” from the ICJ on “the legal consequences arising from the policies and practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem.” Any opinion from the ICJ, which sits in The Hague, would not be binding, but it could add to the growing international legal pressure on Israel over the Gaza war.