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ADEN, Yemen: Yemen’s Houthis said Friday that at least nine people were killed by Israeli strikes on the country’s capital of Sanaa the previous day, the latest in an increase in exchanges between Israel and the Iranian-backed militants over the war in Gaza.
The strikes on Thursday afternoon came a day after a drone launched by the Houthis wounded 22 people in the southern Israeli city of Eilat, a rare breach of Israel’s air defenses.
According to the health ministry in the Houthi-controlled northern half of Yemen, which includes Sanaa, four children, two women and three older people were among the dead. Houthi officials also said 59 children, 35 women and 80 older people were among the wounded.
Medics were still searching for victims believed to be trapped under rubble, the militants said, indicating the casualty tolls could rise.
The Israeli military said Thursday it carried out strikes in Yemen, with dozens of aircraft targeting Houthi military command headquarters, military camps and security and intelligence facilities.
A Houthi spokesperson, Omar El-Bekhety, said Thursday the Israeli strikes targeted residential neighborhoods and electricity facilities and claimed the Houthis’ defense systems had thwarted a “large part of the attack.”
“These crimes will not deter our people or break their will but will increase their steadfastness and resilience in confronting the Zionist crimes and continuing to support and back the honorable, oppressed, free people of Gaza,” he added.
According to Sanaa residents, one of the strikes hit a building in a densely populated area in Sanaa, believed to have housed a Houthi leader. The Associated Press could not independently verify the claim.
Ahmed Al-Mahweity said Friday that the strikes set off intense explosions that damaged several houses in the neighborhood. Selim Rageh, another resident, said several cars were also damaged.
“Everyone in the area came out covered in dust as if they came out from graves,” said Salem Al-Qasab, a shop owner. “Thick dust rose from the ground due to the intensity of the explosions. It was a terrifying scene, with the skies turning to clouds of black smoke and dust.”
Akram Al-Adeiny said Thursday the explosion was so intense it brought down the ceiling of his house, though no one was injured. His colleague in a cellphone shop lost his wife and child in one of the attacks, he said.
The Sanaa residents spoke to the AP over the phone.
Israel has launched previous airstrikes in response to the Houthis firing missiles and drones at Israel. The Houthis have launched missiles and drones toward Israel and targeted ships in the Red Sea for over 22 months, saying they are attacking in solidarity with Palestinians during the war in Gaza.

PARIS: International doctors and nurses who treated Palestinians in Gazan hospitals described wounds more severe than civilians had suffered in other modern conflicts, according to a peer-reviewed study published Friday.
For the research in the leading medical journal BMJ, 78 humanitarian health care workers mostly from Europe and North America answered survey questions describing the severity, location and cause of the wounds they saw during their stints in the Gaza Strip.
The British-led team of researchers said it is the most comprehensive data available about Palestinian injuries during Israel’s nearly two-year offensive against militant group Hamas, given that the territory’s health facilities have been devastated and international access is heavily restricted.
Two thirds of the health care workers had previously deployed to other conflict zones, the vast majority of whom said the injuries in Gaza were “the worst thing that they’ve ever seen,” the study’s lead author, British surgeon Omar El-Taji, told AFP.
Up to three months after they returned from Gaza, the doctors and nurses — aided by log books and shift records — filled out a survey about the injuries they saw during deployments lasting from two to 12 weeks between August 2024 and February 2025.
They catalogued more than 23,700 trauma injuries and nearly 7,000 wounds caused by weapons — numbers which broadly echoed data from the World Health Organization, the study said.
’Unusually severe’
It is difficult to get data about injuries in any conflict, but the study described the wounds in Gaza as “unusually severe.”
In the territory, which has been relentlessly bombed and shelled by the Israeli military, over two thirds of the weapon-related injuries were caused by explosions, according to the study.
That is more than double the rate of explosive injuries recorded among civilians in other modern conflicts, the study said.
Instead, it was similar to the rate suffered by US soldiers during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it added.
El-Taji emphasized this was a “really significant” difference, because unlike civilians, soldiers have training and protection, and know that they are headed toward danger.
“The volume, distribution, and military grade severity of injuries, indicate patterns of harm that exceed those reported in previous modern-day conflicts,” the study said.
El-Taji said patients also had an uncommonly “huge” proportion of third- and fourth-degree burns, which are burns that go through the skin.
When he deployed to Gaza last year, El-Taji said he saw a shocking “amount of children that came in with burns so severe that you could literally see their muscle and see their bone.”
Malnutrition and dehydration were the most commonly reported illnesses in the territory, where UN-backed assessment declared famine in August.
Anthony Bull, a professor at Imperial College London’s Center for Blast Injury Studies who was not involved in the research, told AFP that “this is a very important piece of work.”
Bull pointed out that the data only includes wounded people who “survived to the point of seeing a health care worker.”
‘The worst part’
The survey also had a section allowing the health care workers to write freely about what they had witnessed.
“The worst part was mothers begging us to save their already-dead children,” one physician was cited as saying.
Others described children “expressing suicidal intent” after watching family members die.
Many described operating in dire circumstances with almost no supplies or support, a situation that led to decisions about how to ration care for the patients most likely to survive.
El-Taji arrived at the Gaza European Hospital in May last year, just days before Israel launched a major invasion in the neighboring southern city of Rafah.
For nights on end, groups of up to 70 seriously wounded people came to the hospital, he said.
One night El-Taji and other doctors and nurses gave blood to make up for dwindling supplies, he said.
The war was triggered by the October 7, 2023 attack by Palestinian militant group Hamas on Israel that resulted in the deaths of 1,219 people, mostly civilians, according to official data.
Israel’s retaliatory campaign in Gaza has killed more than 65,500 people, also mostly civilians, according to figures from the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry that the UN considers reliable.
More than 167,000 Gazans have been injured, according to the health ministry.
El-Taji lamented that international health care workers have been increasingly barred from Gaza.
In August, the WHO’s representative in the Palestinian territories, Rik Peeperkorn, said that this “arbitrary denial” was leading to more preventable deaths.