Houthi Ballistic Missile Hits Israel’s Main Ben Gurion Airport
Six people injured in the blast, international fights disrupted.
At least 6 people were reported injured when a ballistic missile fired by Yemen’s Houthi terrorist group struck Israel’s main Ben Gurion Airport, Israeli media reported Sunday morning.
Israel’s Arrow and U.S.-made THAAD air defense systems failed to intercept the Houthi ‘hypersonic’ missile based on technology provided by Iran. “A missile from Yemen fired in the morning at Israel was not intercepted and fell in the Ben Gurion Airport area. Both the Arrow and THAAD missile defenses failed to hit the projectile,” the Israeli TV channel i24NEWS reported. “The attack caused several international airlines to cancel flights to Israel.”
Both Israel’s long-range Arrow air defence system and the American THAAD system failed to intercept the Houthi missile that struck Ben Gurion Airport this morning. https://t.co/ia2iTt58nx
— Aviva Klompas (@AvivaKlompas) May 4, 2025
It is unclear if this was a direct hit or if a fragment from the intercepted missile fell on the airport, Israeli news reports say. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF), which operates the country’s air defense array, acknowledged that a missile from Yemen had landed within the parameters of the airport. “Following the sirens that sounded in a number of areas in Israel, several attempts were made to intercept the missile launched from Yemen. A fall was identified in the area of Ben-Gurion Airport,” the military said in a press release early Sunday morning.
The Houthi missile hit just 75 meters from Terminal 3 at Ben Gurion Airport, narrowly avoiding a direct strike that could have triggered a full-scale war.
This needs a powerful response. pic.twitter.com/ySGvEmnshN
— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) May 4, 2025
The missile, which landed near the airport’s terminal 3, left several injured. “MDA [Israel’s equivalent of the Red Cross] medics and paramedics provided medical treatment to a 50-year-old man and a 54-year-old woman who were lightly wounded due to the blast, and a 32-year-old woman who was wounded on the way to the shelter,” the Jerusalem Post reported. “The wounded were evacuated to and treated at Shamir Medical Center in Tzrifin, including one person in moderate condition in the trauma room and four in mild condition.”
OMG. JFK airport was just hit by a ballistic missile! Wonder what the US will do now!
Oh wait, sorry, I read wrong. It was Ben Gurion Airport, Israel’s main airport.
Carry on. Nothing to see here. Only millions of Jews in bomb shelters and a shut down airport.
It’s time… pic.twitter.com/oFmVjW61Jk
— Hillel Fuld (@HilzFuld) May 4, 2025
The Israeli news outlet Ynetnews reported the details of the incident:
The ballistic missile that struck Ben Gurion Airport was of a new model capable of evading radar systems, Houthi-affiliated media claimed on Sunday.
However, senior Israeli officials later said the missile was not unusual and noted that similar ones had been intercepted in the past.
According to the officials, an Arrow anti-air system interceptor was first launched at the Houthi missile, but missed. An investigation is underway to determine whether the failure was due to human error or a technical malfunction.
They stressed that the target was properly detected, with IDF Home Front Command alerts issued several minutes before air raid sirens sounded. The missile struck Israel’s international airport while the sirens were still sounding.
Following the failed Arrow interception, a THAAD interceptor from an American battery was launched as a second layer of defense, but also failed to hit the target. While Arrow’s interception rate is higher than THAAD’s, neither system provides foolproof protection.
The Houthis officially claimed responsibility for the launch.
🚨Sirens sounded across Israel due to a projectile launch from Yemen pic.twitter.com/ZxgypYMEJp
— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) May 4, 2025
Houthis declared hostilities against Israel nearly 19 months ago following Hamas’ October 7 massacre, launching numerous drones and long-range missiles towards the country. The Iran-backed jihadist group has massively disrupted the global supply chain by launching a campaign of maritime terrorism against U.S. and Western-owned shipping, killing sailors and sinking ships.
President Trump is absolutely right!
Attacks by the Houthis emanate from Iran. Israel will respond to the Houthi attack against our main airport AND, at a time and place of our choosing, to their Iranian terror masters. pic.twitter.com/eO4hyUzNsI
— Benjamin Netanyahu – בנימין נתניהו (@netanyahu) May 4, 2025
In mid-March, President Donald Trump ordered a “decisive and powerful military action” against the Houthis, resulting in a wave of U.S. airstrikes against key terrorist targets in Yemen.
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Now, that will get Israel’s Irish up!
Meant to upvote you.
The White House asked Israel to let the U.S. deal with Yemen instead of responding itself to missile attacks. Israel’s agreement to sit back may be coming to an end.
This was bound to happen sooner or later. I know what I would do in response and it wouldn’t be pretty.
These systems aren’t perfect. They’ve done very well though. I look forward to Israel’s response. Hopefully it won’t be a measured one.
I hope it IS measured……… in very large units and over an extended period of time.
Shouldn’t someone be making a rather big crater in the area where this attack originated? How hard is it to find the origin of this hypersonic missile attack?
I haven’t seen any (reliable) estimates of the missile-type used in this specific attack. But, the Houthis have been using the Iranian developed Burkan-2, which is a more advanced variant of the SCUD. SCUDs, like many other short/intermediate range ballistic missiles can be launched from mobile platforms, like tractor-trailer or rail-car configurations, and that’s the problem. Yes, the Israeli (or at least us) can likely pinpoint the exact location of the launch using satellite and drone (or other airborne tracking systems) tech. But, the location is quite likely a road in the middle of nowhere.
When Biden took the Houthis off the terror watchlist, it gave them considerable breathing room to hide & mobilize their offensive ballistic missile program, which will make it difficult to significantly degrade with airpower alone. Ground troops exist because of the diminishing utility of airstrikes in terrain where there’s places to hide…especially underground or in an urban setting.
If this general area wasn’t being heavily monitoring by satellite and/or other means before and after this attack, I’d be surprised. I guess they may be able to move but being able to move without being tracked or later found, at any time, either when the acquire, prepare or launch their Iranian supplied missiles is rather shocking, unless nobody is seriously looking.
Weapons storage warehouses and government facilities don’t move though and would make good targets.
Your comment about mobile platforms is apropos. This is why it was so hard to hunt down SCUDs during the first gulf war. Drones which didn’t exist then are the answer to find and pinpoint the mobile platforms as they are getting ready to launch.
Also infrastructure to the extent Yemen has any.
Hold on a second. I had assumed possibly true that a mobile platform could fire a hypersonic but technically speaking, exactly what type of mobile platform? Not something jerry-rigged into the back of an old Datsun I would think but maybe I’m wrong. So if the Houthis if moving around something more sophisticated to launch their attacks, is it really that easy to hide?
Most mobile launch systems I’ve seen are truck based with the trailer on which the missile erector resides either integrated with the truck or pulled by it.
Lol. This wasn’t a ‘hypersonic’ missile. This was a supersonic missile. The SCUD technology has existed since the 1950s. Its NATIVE launcher was a mobile launcher. The Soviets built thousands of these things and over the decades, they’ve been improved with iterative changes (largely by the Iranians) in the missile propellent and guidance systems. But, the core of the missile launching systems are….old and very mobile.
Why go after the site of a mobile launcher instead of a more significant target?
What I want is satellite imagery of the hours /days leading up to the launch to backtrack to the place the launching truck came from. THAT facility is what will be worth enough to bomb. If enough mobile launchers all can be tracked to the same site it would confirm what needs leveling and deep penetration bombs (like MOABs) dropped on it.
“This needs a powerful response” ……. against Iran. They need to pay a high enough price tor them to stop enabling this. Otherwise, nothing will change.
As with Gaza, Yemen needs to be churned until nothing stands more than two inches above mean ground level. Cherenkov radiation optional.
Gaza is too close to Israel for radiation to be an option. Yemen is another story but it does seem a waste of a nuke.
Neutron bomb. Less boom, less fallout.
Sooner or later we are going to have to face facts and deal with the Iranian menace.
Democrats have a very poor track record when it comes to regime changes.
The Shah of Iran wasn’t exactly the greatest but what followed in his wake was exponentially worse – Thanks Jimmy Carter!
Muammar Gaddafi wasn’t the greatest either but murdering him hasn’t exactly improved Libya, has it? Thanks Hillary Clinton!
Whatever the Israelis decide to do in response, I am 100% on board. Perhaps there are still some beepers in the storage closet.
Sadam was a known factor too. It would have been better to have left him in power than what has happened to Iraq with him gone.
No, it would not have been better. He was a major sponsor of international terrorism, and had to go. He also had an active WMD development program, and the sanctions were failing to stop it; the only thing keeping him somewhat in check was the army camped on his doorstep, and that wasn’t a sustainable situation either. But having removed him, it would have been better to install a strongman and let him run it as he saw fit subject to our interests, as many neocons wanted, rather than stay there and try to create a democracy.
Actually Biden’s idea of partitioning Iraq, which Republicans like to mock him for, was probably the best idea he ever had.
“was probably the best idea he ever had”
That’s like the Cryan Shames’ greatest hits.
HE had chemical weapons for WMDs. We can argue all day about his nuclear program.
Sadam killed anyone who was a threat to him. Good luck finding a strongman.
Killing Gadaffi was a bad thing, but only because he had already surrendered to us and started to cooperate with us.
And why did he do that? Only because we captured Saddam Hussein, and he figured he would be next if he didn’t do something radical.
So he turned over his entire weapons program to us, and guess what, he was much farther along than our intel told us. For all that our intel may have overstated the risk from Iraq, it greatly understated that from Libya. Given those two options it’s obviously far more prudent to overestimate a risk than to underestimate it, and to act to put down any potential threat rather than ignoring it and hoping for the best.
It’s starting to look like the summer of ’25 will be interesting. Stock up on everything.
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Sadam was a known factor too. It would have been better to have left him in power than what has happened to Iraq with him gone.
Sadam was angling for nukes. This is revisionist history. I didn’t like the Bush admin but anyone that pretends that we didn’t go there and prevent a bigger catastrophe didn’t pay attention.
No it isn’t. We had crappy intelligence and were played. In fact Sadam often played up capabilities he never had. He often denied access to inspectors even though there was nothing to see to build up the image that he had stuff he didn’t. It burned him in the end.
Iran was and is more dangerous than Iraq and Sadam was a counter to Iran’s influence in the region.
I don’t think we were played. I think it’s he who was played. Our intelligence was as good as it was possible to be; he did have an active WMD development program, and all indications were that there was a stockpile of chemical weapons, and possibly more. Internal documents found after the war seem to show that he believed this stockpile existed. And if he believed it then how could our sources possibly have known better than him?
So what happened to it? Some of it may have been in the convoy he sent to Syria (if those trucks were not empty). But I think the main answer is that he was played. He was pouring all this money into the program and getting positive reports about results, so he thought he had the capacity to use these weapons if he decided to, and that there were materials to send to Syria at the last minute. But I think the money was all ending up in Swiss bank accounts owned by the scientists who were supposedly working on the project, and the reports they sent him were false. If his secret police could not find that out, there was no way we could have, and we couldn’t afford to guess.
As Condoleeza Rice put it, the normal laws governing preemptive strikes require a credible warning of an imminent strike by the enemy, but in this case that requirement couldn’t apply because the first warning we were likely to get would be a mushroom cloud, by which time it wouldn’t be imminent but past, so we couldn’t afford to wait for that.
It looks to me like the missile was either a dud or it was just a piece of one as there was no explosion just impact dust. Trump is correct in his reversal of Biden’s policy to just ignore them. Hit them until there is nothing left and match each strike in Yeman with one on Iran’s military infrastructure until they get the message.
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