The head of the World Health Organization said on Friday he was not sure he was going to survive an air strike on Yemen's main airport carried out by Israel a day earlier during a series of attacks on the Iran-aligned Houthi movement.

The top U.N. humanitarian official in Yemen says Israeli airstrikes hit Yemen’s main airport as a civilian Airbus 320 with hundreds of passengers on board was landing this week

Israel is signaling a wider campaign against Houthi militants in Yemen, a mountainous and impoverished country more than 1,000 miles from Israeli territory.

An advanced U.S. military anti-missile system was used in Israel to try to intercept a projectile for the first time since President Joe Biden placed the system in Israel in October, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters on Friday.

Israel has banned the pan-Arab Al Jazeera network and accused six of its Gaza reporters of being militants. The Qatar-based broadcaster denies the allegations and accuses Israel of trying to silence its war coverage, which has focused heavily on civilian casualties from Israeli military operations.

Director-General of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, says he was close to the departure lounge when it was hit.

Israel has severely weakened Hamas and Hezbollah. Now it's going after another member of Iran's so-called axis of resistance: the Houthi rebels of Yemen.

In response, Houthi forces targeted Israel's Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv with a hypersonic missile early Friday morning, the Houthis said in a statement. The missile was intercepted before crossing into Israeli territory, the Israel Defense Forces said in a statement.

A Houthi political official says the group will continue attacking Israel in solidarity with the Palestinians despite the escalating Israeli air strikes in Yemen.Mohammed al-Bukhaiti told the BBC that the Houthis would "escalate our military targeting of Israel" until it stopped what he described as "the genocide in Gaza".

The World Health Organization’s director-general said airstrikes on Yemen’s main airport occurred as he was about to board a flight in the Houthi rebel-held capital of Sanaa

World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus was about to board a plane at the Sanaa International Airport when it came under attack. A crew member on the plane was injured, he said.