JERUSALEM 

The Israeli army said Thursday that its air defenses downed a "suspicious aerial target” in the Red Sea that was heading toward southern Israel.

The army statement said the object did not enter Israeli airspace.

The Times of Israel news website reported that residents in the southern city of Eilat heard a huge blast.

On Tuesday, the Israeli army admitted that a cruise missile likely fired by Yemen’s Houthi group crossed into Israeli airspace and struck an open area near Eilat early Monday morning.

The Houthis released a statement late Thursday saying the group targeted Eilat with an advanced missile.

"One of the most significant operations carried out by the Yemeni Armed Forces this week was targeting Umm al-Rashrash (Eilat) with an advanced missile,'' the group's leader, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, said in a recorded speech aired by the Houthi-run Al-Masirah television channel.

"The missile managed to reach Eilat, bypassing all US and Israeli detection and interception technologies,'' he added.

The Houthis have been targeting cargo ships in the Red Sea owned or operated by Israeli companies or transporting goods to and from Israel in solidarity with the Gaza Strip, where nearly 32,000 people have been killed in a deadly Israeli offensive since last October following an attack by the Palestinian group Hamas.

With the US and UK launching retaliatory airstrikes against Houthi sites in Yemen, the Houthis declared that they consider all American and British ships military targets.

A coalition led by the US under the name Operation Prosperity Guardian has conducted intermittent airstrikes since Jan. 12 that have targeted Houthi sites in parts of Yemen in response to the attacks in the Red Sea.

*Writing by Ahmed Asmar and Mohammad Sio