Houthi rebels in Yemen claim to have retaliated against Israeli airstrikes on Sana’a’s airport early on Friday with a missile aimed at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport and a drone attack on Tel Aviv.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said their defences intercepted the ballistic missile before it reached Israeli airspace, though residents in the centre of the country were ordered into shelters for fear of falling debris. There were no reports in Israel of hostile drones over Tel Aviv.

It was the latest in a series of tit-for-tat exchanges. Thursday’s Israeli airstrikes were in retaliation for a Houthi missile and drone launch against Israel on Wednesday. The Houthis began mounting attacks aimed at Israel and Israeli shipping at the start of the Gaza war in October 2023, saying they were acting in solidarity with Palestinians.

A Houthi statement on Friday said Israel’s strikes “will only increase the determination and resolve of the great Yemeni people to continue supporting the Palestinian people”.

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, vowed that Israeli strikes on Yemen would continue, saying Israel’s aim in Yemen was the elimination of the Houthi threat, which he called a “terrorist entity in Iran’s axis of evil”.

“We will persist until we complete the job,” Netanyahu said.

Netanyahu and his defence minister, Israel Katz, monitored the Israeli attacks on Yemen on Thursday from the air force command centre. According to Israeli press accounts, 25 fighter jets took part in 1,200-mile (2,000km) sorties that hit an array of targets across Yemen. The primary target was Sana’a international airport, where the attack left the top of the control tower a bombed-out shell and shattered windows in terminal buildings. Airport authorities said four people were killed and 20 injured.

An Israeli statement said the air force also struck the Hezyaz power station south of Sana’a on Thursday, as well as the port, an oil terminal and power station around Hodeidah, saying the facilities were used “to smuggle Iranian weapons into the region and for the entry of senior Iranian officials”. Houthi media said a total of six people were killed in the strikes.

Katz said after the operation: “As we have said, whoever harms Israel, we will harm them. We will hunt down all of the Houthis’ leaders and we will strike them just as we have done in other places.”

The head of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, was at Sana’a airport waiting to depart when the Israeli warplanes struck on Thursday. A crew member from Tedros’s plane was injured in the strike.

“When the attacks on the Sana’a airport happened, [Tedros] and several UN colleagues were having their passports stamped before heading to the UN plane,” Margaret Harris, a WHO spokesperson, said. “They were evacuated by UN security to take shelter in UN-marked vehicles. They remained in the UN-marked vehicles until the bombing stopped, at which time the UN team left the airport and went to a safer place.”

Tedros, who had been in Yemen to negotiate the release of detained UN staff and to assess the humanitarian situation, said on Friday that the crew member had undergone surgery and had been evacuated.

Tedros said on social media that his delegation had flown with the wounded member of the UN Humanitarian Air Service from Sana’a to Jordan, where he would receive further medical treatment.

Israel’s air force commander, Maj Gen Tomer Bar, said Israel had used only a small part of its military might against the Houthis so far. “We are capable of much more,” Bar said.

Military analysts in Israel said the IDF would find it much harder to pursue a remote enemy such as the Houthis than it had been to eliminate the leadership of Hamas in Gaza or Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The military commentator Yossi Yehoshua wrote in the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper: “In Gaza, a two-hour drive (without traffic) from the minister’s office at the Kirya [defence headquarters] in Tel Aviv, it took a long time to find the leaders of Hamas. In the north, intelligence information was systematically gathered in order to put the assassinations of the senior Hezbollah leadership into action when the order was finally given.

“Assassinating seasoned terrorist leaders who know how to hide in a faraway, chaotic country isn’t exactly a walk in the park.”

The IDF is still fighting Hamas in the wreckage of Gaza nearly 15 months after it invaded the coastal strip in October last year in response to Hamas’s shock attack on southern Israel, which killed 1,200 Israelis. The death toll in Gaza is estimated at more than 45,000.

On Friday, Israeli troops entered Kamal Adwan hospital, one of the last functioning medical facilities in Gaza, and ordered all those inside out into the hospital compound and a nearby school, where they began searching patients and medical staff, according to witness accounts.