January 17, 2025
Yemen’s Houthis the last Iran-backed group still fully present in the war against Israel that began 14 months ago are escalating attacks on Israel,
though with extremely poor aim.
With Hamas on the ropes after losing much of its forces in Gaza since the conflict began in October 2023, with Hezbollah having signed an official truce with Israel, and with Iraqi militias pressured by Baghdad to stop sending drones against Israel, the Houthis are the only ones still firing in force at Israel.
Israelis view those attacks as efforts by the Houthis to inflict fatigue on Israel but not to inflict enough casualties to trigger Israeli fury. “We are witnessing escalation management by the Houthis,” said Uzi Rubin, an architect of Israel’s air defenses and veteran Defense Ministry adviser. “They vowed to attack Tel Aviv because we attacked Sanaa, but they are not yet ready to inflict major civilian casualties. Pre-dawn strikes mean people aren’t out and about.”
But it does mean they are awakened and have to run to air raid shelters in their pajamas. The equilibrium may be difficult to maintain. Of four Houthi ballistic missiles launched at Tel Aviv in the third week of December, Israel said it shot down three, while one exploded in a vacant playground, shattering the windows of homes and injuring three people.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has blamed the fall of the Syrian regime on Iran, because it declined to fight advancing rebel troops. In his annual marathon press conference December 19, Putin also said that Russia had flown 4,000 Iranian troops out of the country. The Islamic Republic was furious.
But not at Putin for blaming Iran for the fall of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Instead, Tehran was incensed at him for claiming that Russia flew Iranian troops out of Syria to safety. Iran said the Russians flew 4,000 Iranian civilians out of the country, but did not evacuate any troops. The Islamic Republic didn’t just issue a simple correction of what Putin said, but acted deeply offended and complained bitterly.
It is possible Tehran made a major issue of what Putin said about the evacuation just to distract from his accusation that Assad’s fall was the fault of Iran. The Pasdar general who ran Iranian operations in Syria says Iran’s relations with President Bashar al-Assad had become strained in the past year because Assad had rebuffed repeated Iranian requests to allow it to launch attacks against Israel from Syrian soil using the militia troops it commanded in Syria.
He also complained that the Russians lied when they said they were bombing the rebel offensive to try to save Assad. He said the Russian warplanes just dropped their bombs in the desert. That was contradicted by the fact that many in Syria had reported seeing the Russians bomb the rebels, although only for the first few days of the rebel offensive that began in late November.
Brig. Gen. Behruz Esbati, the Pasdar commander in Syria, shared his observations in a speech December 31. He also said that Iran was now helping groups inside Syria in an effort to defeat the rebels. “We can activate all the networks we have worked with over the years. We can activate the social groups that our people lived among for years. We can be active in social media and we can form resistance cells. Now, we can operate there as we do in other foreign arenas.
And we have already started,” he said, announcing as active policy what many others in Iran have been suggesting Iran should do. But his remarks drawing the most attention were his acknowledgement that Iran had suffered a huge defeat in Syria when Assad was driven from the country and the Pasdaran were driven from it as well.
Iranians have spent the past month boastThe Islamic Republic ignored what he said about that. Putin blamed Syrian troops as well as Iranian troops for the Assad regime collapse, saying they all “retreated without a fight, blew up their positions and left.” Actually, it doesn’t appear that they blew up many positions before fleeing. Putin didn’t mention that after Russian planes made a few bombing runs against the rebels on the first day of their advance, Russia did nothing more to confront the rebels either in the air or on the ground.
Russia has two large military bases in Syriaan air force base and a naval base, both on the Mediterranean coast plus a host of small bases across the north. With the fall of Assad, it has been seen evacuating the smaller bases and consolidating those forces at the two big bases. Putin said the new rulers in Syria and most Middle Eastern countries wanted Russia to keep its two bases. No Arab officials have said anything publicly along those lines.
Putin tried to make it sound like the decision was purely his to make. “We’ll need to decide for ourselves,” he told the press conference.” Two Houthi missiles have landed in Tel Aviv since then. Iranian news accounts made it sound like the US bombing of Germany in World War II.
But both missiles landed in open areas and neither did much damage beyond digging craters and shattering windows. One person was killed. Iranian media boasted of how another Yemeni missile in January destroyed Haifa’s power plant. But the electricity didn’t go out in Haifa. In Tehran, Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi said the “accuracy” of the missiles used by Yemen had disrupted all the plans of the “American-Zionist coalition.” More disruptive for Israelis is the fact that hundreds of thousands of people rush to shelters each time sirens sound throughout Israel’s main population center.
That’s a precaution not just against direct impacts but also the shower of debris from high-altitude interceptions. A school building was demolished in one attack when part of a Houthi missile warhead landed on it. But, again, that was a pre-dawn attack, and no one was in the school.
In response to earlier attacks, Israel has twice bombed the Hodeida port, a key source of income and a conduit for imported goods for the Houthis. Then Israel sent warplanes to hit rebel targets in the capital, Sanaa, and also threatened to assassinate rebel leaders.
The US and UK have also attacked the militia from the air. In statements on the launches, the Houthis have pledged to keep battling Israel until the war ends in Gaza. (That’s what Hezbollah said repeatedly before signing a truce with Israel in December.) The Houthis have attacked 106 commercial ships in the Red Sea and Gulf of Oman since November 2023, according to one tabulation.
Two ships have been sunk and one disabled, but most of the attacking missiles and drones just dent the giant ships, fall harmlessly into the sea, or are shot down by the American, British and French ships patrolling the area. While the Western defense works, it’s very expensive; one news account said the US had expended $1.1 billion worth of munitions to foil the Houthis.
The Houthis have even fired missiles at US and British warships, which are legally acts of war. At the end of 2024, they fired seven cruise missiles at the US aircraft carrier Harry S Truman. But nothing the Houthis have aimed at US and British warships has gotten through further making the Iranian weapons the Houthis use look laughable to the rest of the world. The attacks on commercial ships have prompted many shipping firms to re-route their ships around the southern tip of Africa, which lengthens the journey and raises costs.
But the real harm has been to Egypt, whose major income sources are Suez Canal transits and tourism, both of which are now in the doldrums due to the fighting. Egypt says canal revenues are down 60 percent. The responses of ordinary Israelis have ranged from jittery to jocular. A TV show interviewed experts about the dangers of sleep deprivation. In parliament, a lawmaker reassured her son by phone that she would be there to hug him in the middle of the night, a conversation caught by the podium microphone. A popular social-media meme flayed the Houthis for disrupting couples’ intimacy. “We have long seen that our enemies use our own alert system as a form of psychological pressure against us.
Here, that works on a large scale,” Rubin said. Doron Hadar, a former commander of the Israeli military’s Crisis Management Unit, which runs simulations of enemy capabilities and doctrines, also saw a bid to chafe nerves. “They’re trying to drive us nuts, while keeping below a certain threshold in this conflict.” said Hadar. “Iran isn’t in a rush to put its Yemeni branch’s head on the block quite yet.” “The Houthis have been very, very hard to shut down,” said James Jeffrey, who was the US special representative for Syria engagement during President Trump’s first term.
“Israel can take out capabilities, but as long as the Houthis can get additional supplies from Iran, particularly missile components, they can keep this up,” Jeffrey said. He speculated that Israel might eventually decide “to go after Iran” directly, if the Houthis don’t stop their attacks.
And, in fact, there is now much discussion in Israel about ending attacks on the Houthis and just going for the jugular in Iran, hoping that more attacks might topple the Islamic Republic and end all its support for the Houthis plus Hezbollah, Hamas and the numerous Iraqi militias.
