Yemen’s Houthi rebels have claimed responsibility for a drone strike that hit an apartment building in the Israeli city on Thursday night, killing one resident and wounding four. If confirmed, it would appear to be a rare example of a foreign-launched strike reaching a target inside Israel’s well-developed ring of air defenses – and at unusually long range for the Houthis. Initial bystander reports and multiple local media accounts suggest that the drone came from seaward, which would require a large course deviation if launched from Yemen.
The Houthi group has demonstrated considerable ability in launching drone strikes on merchant shipping in the Red Sea, but Tel Aviv is 1,000 nautical miles north of Houthi-controlled territory – beyond the maximum range of its known drones. The Houthi group has previously targeted the Israeli port of Eilat, which is geographically closer, but without success.
Images taken by bystanders at the scene in Tel Aviv show components of a midsize drone with straight wings, and surveillance cameras near the scene captured the sound of a loud internal combustion engine – like a typical drone turboprop – just before the explosion. Israeli forces have confirmed that the blast was caused by an “aerial target.”
Early open-source intelligence analysis of the drone debris points to a Houthi-operated family of UAVs, the Samad series. This design carries the name of former Houthi leader Saleh al-Sammad, who was killed in the Yemeni civil war in 2018.
The long-range variant, the Samad-3, has been identified by Israeli forces as the same as the Iranian-built KAS 04 – a drone which Iran-backed Houthi forces have used against U.S. shipping in the Red Sea. The destroyer USS Carney shot down a KAS 04 that came near a U.S.-flagged ship in the Red Sea last November. The KAS 04 also gained notoriety for its use by other Iranian proxy forces, who deployed it to launch attacks on American outposts in Iraq in 2021.
The Houthi group has yet to release details to accompany its claim, and the Houthis are far from the only operator of this drone series. Others are much closer: another Iranian-supplied proxy – Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah, which regularly exchanges cross-border fire with Israeli forces – is known to operate similar UAV models.
“The math [of a Houthi strike] just doesn’t add up, at all. Unless it’s an entirely new system, or launched from somewhere else, not Yemen,” said Charles Lister, Director of the Middle East Institute’s Syria division.
Source: The Maritime Executive
