TEL AVIV — A surprise drone attack in the heart of Israel’s most populous city killed one and injured at least five people early Friday, shattering windows and setting off alarms just yards from the U.S. Embassy branch office. The Iranian-backed Houthi group in Yemen claimed responsibility for the strike, which evaded Israel’s expansive air defense network and spiked concerns of wider regional violence during the Gaza war.
An Israel Defense Forces spokesman said the explosion was caused by an Iranian-made drone possibly launched from Yemen, according to early unconfirmed analysis. The IDF said it increased air patrols “to protect Israeli airspace.”
No siren was activated, and the IDF said an initial inquiry pointed to “human error that caused the interception and defense systems not to be operated.” The error may have been related to “identification,” an IDF official said in an earlier briefing, saying that the matter was still being investigated.
The spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, dismissed Houthi claims that the drone was a type of stealth aircraft and maintained it had been picked up by Israeli monitoring systems. A second drone targeting Israeli airspace was successfully intercepted early Friday, he said. Investigators were exploring whether the two attacks were related.
The drone that reached Tel Aviv was an Iranian-made Samad-3 that had been modified to fly greater distances, he said.
The Houthis, a Yemen-based group that has been attacking commercial ships in the Red Sea since last year, said Friday in a statement that it had carried out a “military operation” targeting Tel Aviv that “successfully achieved its objectives,” using what it said was a new drone capable of evading countermeasures. The attack, the statement said, was in response to Israeli “massacres” in Gaza.
Witnesses said they heard and saw an aircraft appear from the direction of the Mediterranean Sea around 3 a.m. and slam into a building with a loud explosion. There were no warning alarms in a city where residents are used to air raid sirens and alerts on their phones sending them to shelters.
Limor Sagiv, 58, was asleep with her partner in a fifth-floor apartment less than two blocks from the U.S. Embassy facility when the blast shattered their kitchen window and a balcony door.
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“There was an orange flash and a smell like a rubber fire,” said Sagiv, standing in a living room filled with glass shards. They had just returned to the apartment after being told by police to evacuate the area for a few hours in case of secondary attacks.
Noa Yehoshua was up late with friends in a nearby apartment when one of them spotted a small aircraft with a round fuselage and wide wings.
“My friend was sitting by the window and said, ‘Oh, wow, guys, what it that?’” Yehoshua said. “And then it just exploded.”
Yehoshua, 23, an army reservist scheduled to deploy to Gaza next week, said the drone strike was part of the wider war with Iran-backed forces throughout the region that has raged since the Hamas raid on Israeli towns on Oct. 7.
“It’s so surreal that we’re attacked over and over and over again in a war that we didn’t even start,” she said.
During the war in Gaza, the Houthis and other Iran-backed groups in the region have carried out regular attacks they say are aimed at supporting Palestinian militant groups and ending Israel’s military offensive. The Yemeni group has previously claimed drone attacks on the southern Israeli city of Eilat — roughly 1,000 miles from northern Yemen — but the strike on Tel Aviv, if confirmed, appears to represent an increase in the Houthis’ capabilities and reach.
The Yemeni group said it would continue to target Tel Aviv with future attacks.
“The security system is working to immediately strengthen all defense systems, and will come to account with anyone who harms the State of Israel or sends terror against it,” Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said in a statement Friday.
The fatality was a 50-year-old man who was found with severe shrapnel injuries in an apartment adjacent to the blast, said Roee Klein, a paramedic with Magen David Adom, Israel’s national emergency service. The nearby Ichilov Medical Center said Friday it had treated and released five people injured in the strike.
Israeli media identified the fatality as Yevgeny Ferder, a Belarusian immigrant who arrived in Israel two years ago at the beginning of Russia’s war in Ukraine. He was killed in the hotel where he both lived in worked, according to the reports.
Friday’s rare attack on Tel Aviv took place hours after the Israeli air force said it killed two commanders of Hezbollah, the Iran-backed group in Lebanon with which Israel has been exchanging fire. Hezbollah acknowledged the deaths of two of its members but did not identify them as senior operatives.
Israel’s aerial defense system, outfitted primarily for rockets, has for months struggled to identify and eliminate Hezbollah drones — which fly lower and often in nonlinear paths — in attacks on Israel’s north.
Fabian Hinz, a research fellow who studies drones and missiles at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, said that pictures of the debris from the drone that circulated Friday matched the Houthi Samad-3 drone, the group’s “standard long-range strike drone.”
The model had previously been used in strikes against Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates as well as the southern Israeli city of Eilat several times, in attacks that were intercepted, he said.
While Houthi claims that the drone used Friday could evade radar were “certainly false,” it was also possible the group had upgraded the drone to increase its range, including by making the warhead lighter or increasing the size of the fuel tank. It was hard to pinpoint the exact range of the Samad-3, but Hinz said that estimates were between 1,100 to 1,500 miles.
The pictures of the debris appeared to show a “slightly higher performance” Iranian-made engine than those normally seen on the Samad-3, he said. It was unclear, he added, “whether it’s a standard Samad-3 version that just got lucky and got through, or whether it’s a slightly upgraded or improved version.”
While shorter-range versions of the Samad drones were piloted via a radio link and cameras, the longer-range models relied on satellite navigation. Such systems can be jammed, but antennas resistant to jamming had been observed on Iranian drones, he said.
It was difficult to determine exactly where the drone was launched from, given that it appeared to have changed direction at least once, as it headed to Tel Aviv from the Mediterranean Sea, Hinz said. Other Iranian-backed groups, in Iraq and Lebanon, had tended to use smaller Samad models than the one used Friday. If the Houthis had developed a longer-range drone, such a weapon would provide them with “new angles of attack” that could put additional strains on detection systems and Israel’s capabilities.
If Yemen is determined to be the launch site, Israel would find it difficult to launch a counter strike, according to Harrison Mann, a former U.S. Army officer who worked at the Defense Intelligence Agency. Even the United States has struggled to locate Houthi targets, he said, and has already hit the most the most worthwhile ones.
Hamas praised the drone attack in statement, and called on Yemeni militants to launch more of them in defense of the “innocents in Gaza.”
Tel Aviv’s mayor, Ron Huldai, posted on X that the city was on “high alert” after the drone attack and that residents were required to follow emergency instructions. “The war is still here, and it is hard and painful,” he said.
It was not immediately clear whether the drone was targeting the U.S. Embassy branch office.
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Friday in a post on social media that there were no reported injuries to or deaths of U.S. personnel. He also said he spoke with Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and “reaffirmed that our commitment to Israel’s security and right to self-defense remains ironclad.”
Fahim reported from Istanbul, Ables from Seoul, Hendrix from Jerusalem. Lior Soroka in Tel Aviv, Louisa Loveluck and Shira Rubin in Jerusalem, Cate Brown in Washington and Suzan Haidamous in Beirut contributed to this report.
