People last week investigate a crater in a Tel Aviv neighborhood left by a missile launched from Yemen. (Heidi Levine for The Washington Post)
TEL AVIV - Israel is preparing to fight along a new front against Houthi militants in Yemen, striking back at the group for its drone and missile attacks and signaling a potential lengthy campaign that would take the battle far from Israel’s borders.
The Houthi movement, which controls parts of Yemen and is backed by Iran, was once considered by Israel’s security establishment to be a more manageable threat than Hamas in Gaza or Hezbollah in Lebanon. The group attacked Israel soon after the Hamas-led assault on Israeli communities on Oct. 7, 2023.
Since then, the Houthis have fired on or intercepted commercial and naval vessels transiting the Red Sea. In recent weeks, they have also stepped up their attacks on Israel, sending missiles flying toward Israeli cities, most of which were intercepted but forced millions of people to rush to bomb shelters on a near-nightly basis.
The Houthis “are more technologically advanced than perceived by many” and should not be “underrated,” said an Israeli official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
He said that with support from Iran, the Houthis have been able to take “practical steps” in pursuing their ideology, which calls for the destruction of the United States and of Israel.
Their drones, missiles and projectiles, experts say, are managing to circumvent Israel’s once-vaunted air defense systems and are resurfacing Israel’s perennial military dilemma: how to defeat an enemy armed with a relatively cheaper and comparatively ample stockpile of weapons.
“The Houthis want a war of attrition on Israel, to continue firing so that they can say, ‘We are the real resistance,’” said Yoel Guzansky, a former official on Israel’s National Security Council who is now a senior fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv.
But the cost calculus is complicated for Israel. Houthi drones and missiles cost around several thousand dollars each - while each interception costs Israel tens of thousands of dollars, at least.
“Because it’s so cheap for them to try to get a drone or a missile every few days or weeks into Israel, they can win this,” Guzansky said. “The question is now, how does Israel avoid falling into their trap?”
The government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said it is leading Israel in war on seven fronts - a reference to Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iraq and Iran.
Unlike the enemies on Israel’s borders, however, the Houthis are more than 1,000 miles away, embedded in a mountainous, deeply impoverished country without any infrastructural “center of gravity - without places or assets that are so central to their operations that striking them would incapacitate them,” said Danny Orbach, a military historian at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
In response to the Houthi attacks, Israel has stepped up strikes in Yemen in recent weeks.
An Israeli strike hit the international airport in the Houthi-held capital of Sanaa on Thursday, just as World Health Organization Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus was about to board a flight there - prompting U.N. chief António Guterres to call on Israel and militants in Yemen to cease their military actions and use restraint.
Airstrikes “on Sana’a International Airport, the Red Sea ports and power stations in Yemen are especially alarming,” Guterres said in a statement on social media.
The attack killed at least three people at the airport, according to local media, and injured a World Food Program-contracted aircrew member among dozens of others. At least six people were killed and 40 injured in Israeli strikes on infrastructure in Yemen on Thursday, according to Houthi-controlled news agency Saba.
Tedros said Friday that the United Nations evacuated him and his injured colleague to Jordan, “where he will receive further medical treatment.”
“Attacks on civilians and humanitarians must stop, everywhere,” Tedros wrote on X.
Orbach said Israel’s situation is further complicated by the fact that the United States and Britain, which have spearheaded efforts to deter Houthi attacks against Israel and on shipping routes in the Red Sea, are apparently pulling back and potentially saving their missile and drone interceptors.
“There’s a dearth of interceptors because of other wars in the world that the U.S. is planning to use them for, but more fundamentally, the West is very reluctant to reignite this war because it will mean humanitarian disaster on a large scale,” Orbach said.
Israel has “a right to defend themselves” against Houthi attacks, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters at a briefing Friday. He declined to comment directly on the airport strike but said “how they defend themselves matters.”
“We want to see them conduct their operations with a minimal impact, at all, on civilian infrastructure and certainly at much less risk to the civilian population,” Kirby said.
But Israeli officials have said that they cannot afford to allow the Houthis to continue attacking Israel while the country confronts Iranian-backed proxies on several other fronts.
In Lebanon, a fragile ceasefire is holding with Hezbollah, after a military operation that decapitated the group’s leadership. In Syria, Israeli forces remained in positions across the buffer zone between the two countries - and farther inland, in what the Israeli army says are attempts to ensure materiel does not fall into the hands of the country’s new leadership. In Gaza, Israeli forces continue to target Hamas as ceasefire negotiations remain stalled.
And, domestically, Israel continues to deal with sporadic attacks. On Friday morning, an 83-year-old woman, Ludmila Lipovki, was killed when a Palestinian man from the West Bank stabbed her outside her elderly care home in the central Israeli town of Herzliya.
“This is what we are dealing with. These are the terrorists we are fighting,” Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar posted on X in reference to the attack. “And we will win.”
DeYoung reported from Washington. Alon Rom in Tel Aviv and Frances Vinall in Seoul contributed to this report.
