SANA’A (Dispatches) – Yemeni forces 
retaliated against Israeli airstrikes on Sana’a airport early on Friday with a missile aimed at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport and a drone attack on Tel Aviv.
Air raid sirens were sounded over a large part of the Israeli occupied territories, causing Ben Gurion airport to shut down.  
Israel’s emergency services reported that 18 settlers were injured in Tel Aviv while attempting to reach the safety of shelters.
Videos shared online showed Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system failing, as it attempted to intercept the incoming projectile.
The missile strike reportedly forced half of the occupied territories into lockdown, with Israeli outlets describing the incident as a failure of the regime’s defensive measures.
In a statement, the Yemeni armed forces said they “carried out a specific military operation targeting Ben Gurion Airport in the occupied area of Yaffa [Tel Aviv] using a hypersonic ballistic missile of Palestine2 type”.
“The missile succeeded in reaching its target despite the enemy’s censorship, and the operation resulted in casualties and the cessation of navigation at the airport,” it said.
Yemeni forces also carried out an operation targeting “a vital target of the Israeli enemy in the occupied area of Yaffa with a drone, and the operation achieved its goal successfully” it added.
“The UAV force also carried out a military operation targeting the ship (Santa Ursula) in the Arabian Sea east of Socotra Island with a number of drones, and the hit was direct.”
The ship, it said, was targeted “owing to the violation of ban decision of entry to the ports of occupied Palestine [Israel] by the company that owns the ship”.
It came hours after Israeli warplanes conducted airstrikes on Yemen’s capital Sana’a, Red Sea ports and power stations, killing at least six people and injuring 40 others. 
The Israeli military said that in addition to striking the airport, it also hit “military infrastructure” at the ports of Hudaydah, Salif and Ras Kanatib on Yemen’s west coast. It also attacked the country’s Hezyaz and Ras Kanatib power stations.
Reports said the airport was struck by “more than six” attacks with raids also targeting the adjacent Dailami air base.
“This aggression will only increase the determination and resolve of the great Yemeni people to continue supporting the Palestinian people, in fulfillment of their religious, moral and humanitarian duty,” the Friday statement said. 
Yemen’s armed forces, it said, “possess the capabilities that enable them to expand the target bank in occupied Palestine to include more vital facilities belonging to the enemy, and their operations will not stop until the aggression on Gaza sops and the siege is lifted”.
“Israeli airstrikes today on Sanaa International Airport, the Red Sea ports and power stations in Yemen are especially alarming,” the UN chief’s spokesperson Stéphanie Tremblay said in a press briefing, expressing concerns about the risk of further regional escalation.
Tremblay said Secretary-General António Guterres “warns that airstrikes on Red Sea ports and Sana’a airport pose grave risks to humanitarian operations at a time when millions of people are in need of life-saving assistance.”
A member of the UN Humanitarian Air Crew was injured in the attacks at the airport which occurred when a high-level UN delegation, led by World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, was there.

“As we were about to board our flight from Sana’a…the airport came under aerial bombardment,” WHO head wrote.
The WHO chief said the Israeli attacks damaged the air traffic control tower and the departure lounge, “just meters” from where Tedros and his team stood.
“We will need to wait for the damage to the airport to be repaired before we can leave. “My UN and WHO colleagues and I are safe,” he added, offering condolences to families who lost loved ones in the strikes.
According to Yemen’s civil aviation authority, the airport planned to reopen on Friday.
Mohammed Abdul-Salam, the spokesman for Yemen’s Ansarullah resistance movement, described the Israeli strikes as “a Zionist crime against all the Yemeni people.”
He stressed that such attacks won’t stop Yemen from conducting operations in support of the Palestinian people.
On Friday, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in Yemen’s northwestern city of Sa’ada to reiterate their unflinching support for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip amid the Israeli war.
The participants waved Yemeni, Palestinian and Lebanese flags, and carried banners in support of Palestinian resistance factions and in condemnation of the U.S.-assisted Israeli war of extermination against Gazans.
They also held up the portraits of martyred resistance leaders, including Hezbollah’s late Secretary-General Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah.
The demonstrators chanted anti-U.S. and anti-Israeli slogans, and reaffirmed Yemen’s staunch support for the Palestinian cause.
The protesters denounced Israeli air strikes against civilian facilities and critical infrastructure in Yemen, calling upon Yemeni armed forces to respond firmly to the occupying regime’s acts of aggression.
The Yemeni demonstrators reaffirmed their firm support for Palestinians in Gaza, who have been subjected to various forms of aggression and massacres at the hands of the Israeli regime for the past 448 days, amid the U.S. complicity and silence of certain Arab and Muslim governments.
They pointed out that Israeli crimes are expanding to the West Bank, Lebanon and Syria, as part of its attempts to implement the malicious “Greater Israel” scenario at the expense of regional countries and nations.