Yemen vows ‘huge’ response to Israeli aggression on Hudaydah
Yemen’s Ansarullah movement promised “huge” retaliation against Israel on Sunday following the regime’s deadly strike on the port of Hudaydah.
The Yemeni Armed Forces said earlier that they had targeted Israel’s port city of Eilat with ballistic missiles as well as American and Israeli-owned vessels in the Red Sea.
The forces’ spokesman Brigadier General Yahya Saree announced in a statement on Sunday that they carried out a specific military operation against important targets in the Umm al-Rashrash (Eilat) area “with a number of ballistic missiles and the operation has achieved its goals successfully.”
Saree also said the naval and the missile units of Yemen’s Armed Forces conducted a joint military operation targeting the American ship “Pumba” in the Red Sea with a number of ballistic missiles and drones.
Saree underlined that the Yemeni forces would continue their naval operations against Israeli, American, and British ships or those heading to Israeli ports until the regime’s aggression stops and the siege on the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip is lifted.
“The Yemeni armed forces confirm that the response to the Israeli aggression against our country is inevitably coming and will be huge and great,” he asserted.
In Hudaydah, at least six people were killed and more than 80 wounded.
Firefighters struggled to contain the massive blaze caused by the strike on Hudaydah, with a port employee saying fuel storage tanks and a power plant were still on fire on Sunday.
Saudi Arabia urged restraint on Sunday in the wake of the Israeli strike.
The Israeli attack “aggravates the current tension in the region and halts the ongoing efforts to end the war in Gaza,” the Saudi Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
It “called on all parties to exercise maximum restraint and to distance the region and its people from the dangers of war.”
Iran’s Foreign Ministry Spokesman Nasser Kana’ani strongly condemned the Israeli attacks, warning that such aggression risks exacerbating the already dire situation in the region.
Kana’ani noted that such dangerous adventurism on the part of Tel Aviv could escalate tensions and fuel the flames of war in the region.
Israel said it carried out the attacks in response to hundreds of operations that Yemen’s Armed Forces have been conducting against the occupied Palestinian territories and Israeli interests in support of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, who are enduring a genocidal Israeli-US war.
In a daring attack on Friday, the Yemeni forces struck with drones an area near the US consular facility in Tel Aviv early on Friday, killing one person and injuring 10 others as the Israeli air defenses failed to intercept the unmanned aerial vehicle.
Yemen has been targeting the occupied territories as well as Israeli ships and vessels affiliated with the regime since October 7, 2023 when Tel Aviv began a genocidal war against the Gaza Strip.
They have vowed to keep up their operations as long as the regime sustained the war and a simultaneous siege that it has been enforcing against the Palestinian territory.
The Israeli onslaught on Gaza has so far resulted in 38,919 documented Palestinian fatalities, mostly women and children, in addition to 89,622 injuries.