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Hodeida, Yemen — Firefighting teams on Monday were struggling to contain a massive blaze at Yemen’s Hodeida port, days after a deadly Israeli strike damaged oil storage facilities and endangered aid ships in the harbor, which is in the massive portion of the country controlled by the Iran-backed Houthi rebel movement.
Heavy flames and black smoke spiraled into the sky for a third consecutive day following the strike on Saturday, said an AFP correspondent in Hodeida.
Firefighting teams appeared to be making little progress, with the blaze seemingly expanding in some parts of the port, the correspondent said, adding that there were fears the blaze could reach food storage facilities.
High-resolution satellite images taken by Maxar Technologies showed flames consuming a heavily damaged fuel storage area at the Hodeida harbor.
An analysis of satellite imagery by the Dutch peace organization PAX showed at least 33 destroyed oil storage tankers, said Wim Zwijnenburg, a project leader with the group.
“We expect (to find) more damage, as not all storage tanks are visible because of heavy smoke” from the fire and burning fuel, Zwijnenburg told AFP.
The fuel depot is run by the Yemen Petroleum Company, which said late Sunday that the six people killed in the Israel strike were its employees.
The Houthis have said that more than 80 others were wounded in the attack, many of them with severe burns.
With black smoke billowing overhead, a funeral ceremony was held Monday for the victims of the strikes.
Their coffins were carried through the streets of Hodeida, flanked by crowds and led by a Houthi marching band.
The Saturday strike was the first by Israel on the Arabian Peninsula’s poorest country. It came in response to a Houthi-launched drone that breached Israel’s air defenses, killing one person in Tel Aviv on Friday.
The Houthis are part of an informal network of Iran-backed groups, often referred to as proxies, across the region. The Houthis have pledged a “huge” response to the strikes and threatened to attack Tel Aviv again.
U.S. and British forces have targeted Houthi military infrastructure in Yemen for months in response to the group’s regular attacks on commercial and military vessels in the vital shipping lanes of the Red Sea.
The Houthis claim to be carrying out those attacks in support of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, amid the ongoing war there between their ideological allies Hamas and Israeli forces.
