Explosion in Tel Aviv leaves one dead

Photo: Gil Cohen-Magen Agence France-Presse Israeli police officers search the scene of an explosion in Tel Aviv, July 19, 2024.

Agence France-Presse in Tel Aviv

Published at 0:39 Updated at 01:04

• Middle East

One person was killed before dawn Friday in an explosion in central Tel Aviv that appeared to be the result of an airstrike, on the 287th day of the war between Israel and Hamas.

If the airstrike trail is confirmed, it would be the first war-related attack to cause casualties in Tel Aviv since a rocket attack claimed by the Islamist movement Palestinian from the Gaza Strip and injured one on May 26.

On Telegram, the spokesperson for the Houthi rebels in Yemen, Yahya Saree, whose movement has claimed several missile launches in support of Hamas towards Israel since the start of the war, announced the publication “in the coming hours” of an “important press release” about a “military operation […] ] having targeted “Tel-Aviv” in occupied Palestine”.

Israeli police say they received hundreds of reports “around 3 a.m.” local time “about a loud explosion.”

This one hit a building near the intersection of Ben-Yehuda Avenue and Shalom-Aleichem Street, not far from an annex building of the United States Embassy in Israel, according to an AFP journalist, who saw broken windows.

During the search operations, a fifty-year-old was “found dead in his apartment”, said the police, specifying that he had been hit by shards.

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Magen David Adom, Israel's equivalent of the Red Cross, said in a statement that it had treated four injured people, a man and a woman injured in their home, and two other people injured in the street. All four were evacuated conscious to a hospital with “relatively minor” injuries.

“It may have been an airborne explosion […] We were very lucky,” said Peretz Amar, the Tel Aviv police commander at the scene, adding that “the investigation is ongoing.”

“Everything shook”

A resident of central Tel Aviv told AFP he had been awakened by a loud explosion: “Everything shook,” he said.

“No [warning] sirens sounded,” the army said in a statement, adding that “the incident [was] under close investigation” and that the explosion had been “caused by the fall of an aerial target” according to a “preliminary investigation.”

“The Air Force has increased its aerial patrols to protect Israeli airspace,” the text further reads.

The police called “residents to respect safety instructions, and not to approach or touch debris or fragments that could contain explosives.”

Firefighters said they raised the possibility that 'an explosive “drone” was at the origin of the explosion.

At around 7:20 a.m. local time, the Israeli government had not yet officially reacted to the of these events.

On Thursday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Israeli troops in Rafah, a town in the south of the Gaza Strip at the border with Egypt where the army has been carrying out a major offensive since the beginning of May. He praised the military pressure from Israel which, according to him, is taking “Hamas by the throat”.

The war was started on October 7 by a surprise attack by Hamas which resulted in the death of 1,195 people on the Israeli side, the majority of them civilians, according to an AFP count based on official Israeli data.

The Israeli military campaign of retaliation in the Gaza Strip has devastated this small territory and has so far left 38,848 dead, mostly civilians, according to data from the Ministry of Defense. Health of the Hamas-led Gaza government.