Warning sirens sounded about twenty km southwest of Jerusalem this Monday morning. According to a military statement, the Israeli Air Force “intercepted a projectile approaching Israel from Yemen.”
“The projectile did not enter Israeli territory,” said the same source, but its interception would have caused “debris” which caused several fires in the Bet Shemesh sector, against which firefighters were fighting on Monday.
“In parallel with the extinguishing operations, the firefighters are carrying out additional reconnaissance in the area, in order to exclude further fires and damage caused by fragments of interceptors or missiles,” according to the press release from the firefighters of the region of Jerusalem.
In Yemen, the Houthi rebels, who control large parts of the country, are part – with other groups such as the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas or the Lebanese Islamist movement Hezbollah – of what the Islamic Republic of Iran calls the “axis”. of resistance” against Israel. Since the start of the war sparked by the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, the Houthis have carried out several attacks against Israel as well as ships off the coast of Yemen, claiming to act in solidarity with the Palestinians.
Furthermore, the “Islamic Resistance in Iraq”, a coalition of pro-Iranian armed groups, claimed four successive drone attacks, carried out early this Monday against “essential targets” in the north and south of Israel. The Israeli army, for its part, indicated that it had “managed to intercept four drones which were approaching Israel from the east” during the night from Sunday to Monday. “Two of them were intercepted before entering Israeli territory,” said a military statement.
