Explosion near the US Embassy in Tel Aviv leaves one dead and seven injured

The Houthis, a Yemen-based group that has been attacking merchant ships in the Red Sea since last year, said in a statement on Friday that they had carried out a “qualitative military operation” against Tel Aviv, using a new drone that can evade countermeasures. The attack, the statement said, was in response to Israeli “massacres” in Gaza.

During the war in Gaza, the Houthis and other Iranian-backed groups in the region have carried out almost continuous attacks that they say are aimed at supporting Palestinian militant groups and ending Israel’s military offensive. The Yemeni group has previously claimed responsibility for drone strikes on the southern Israeli city of Eilat – about 1,000 miles from northern Yemen – but the attack on Tel Aviv, if confirmed, appears to represent an expansion of the Houthis’ capabilities and reach.

The fatality was a 50-year-old man who was found with severe shrapnel injuries in an apartment near the blast site, said Roee Klein, a paramedic with Magen David Adom, Israel’s national ambulance service.

The rare attack on Tel Aviv on Friday came hours after the Israeli Air Force said it had killed two commanders of Hezbollah, the Iran-backed group in Lebanon with which Israel is fighting firefights. Hezbollah confirmed the deaths of two of its members but did not identify them as senior activists.

The Israeli air defense system, which is primarily equipped to fire missiles, has struggled for months to detect and eliminate Hezbollah drones attacking northern Israel. They fly faster, lower and often on non-linear trajectories.

In the hours following the explosion, Israeli bomb disposal experts and rescue teams were deployed at the site. Police urged residents not to approach the scene and not to touch “rocket debris that may contain explosives.”

Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai posted on X that the city was on “high alert” following the drone attack and that residents were being urged to follow emergency orders. “The war is still here and it is hard and painful,” he said.

It was initially unclear whether the drone was aimed at the US embassy. Representatives of the US embassy in Israel did not respond to a request for comment early Friday.

An Israeli military official who briefed the media on Friday and asked to remain anonymous in accordance with military protocol confirmed that no alarm sounded when the drone approached. An initial investigation pointed to “human error that caused the interception and defense systems to not work.” The error could be related to “identification,” the official added, saying the matter was still under investigation.

The drone is a “large UAV that can travel long distances,” the official said, referring to an unmanned aerial vehicle. The military is considering the possibility that the drone came from Yemen based on the Houthis’ announcements and is also investigating the flight route, the official said.

“To our knowledge, the attack is unlikely to come from the north,” the official said, downplaying the possibility of an attack from Lebanon. “We are not ruling out any possibility,” he added.

Fahim reported from Istanbul and Ables from Seoul. Lior Soroka in Tel Aviv and Suzan Haidamous in Beirut contributed to this report.