A week after announcing they were entering the ever-growing regional war on the side of Iran, Yemen’s Houthi movement has launched missiles at southern Israel, saying the operation, the third such flurry of missiles, was done in coordination with Iran and Hezbollah.
The Houthis firing missiles at Israel is nothing new, but direct coordination with both Iran and Hezbollah, their primary allies in this conflict, suggests deeper cooperation among the factions. The Houthis said the attack had “successfully achieved its objectives.”
Israel reported sirens sounded in Sderot, Ashkelon, Beersheba and Dimona, and that their interceptors were activated over a missile fired from Yemen, and later confirmed that the missile was successfully intercepted.
The Houthis wrote “hypersonic” on their new Palestine 2 missile. Houthi media/Screengrab via X
The coordination seems to have been primarily the timing of the launch, as Iranian missiles were launched at Tel Aviv and Bnai Brak at the same time, wounding 14, and Lebanon’s Hezbollah fired rockets at the northern city of Kiryat Shmona, announcing it as the start of the “Khaybar 2″ operation in defense of Lebanon.
The Houthis had previously targeted the resort city of Eilat with missile strikes, and there were missiles that hit that city, though Israeli media has continued to maintain that all the missiles and drones fired by the Houthis were successfully intercepted, so it’s not clear where the Eilat missile actually came from.
While the Houthis retain a substantial number of missiles from the old Yemen government’s arsenal, their primary involvement in the war could be controlling the Bab al-Mandab Strait, the route through the Red Sea leading into the Gulf of Aden which has been suggested as an alternative route for ships since the Strait of Hormuz has been shuttered by Iran since the start of the war.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for his part, has been arguing that the world should construct massive pipelines to the Mediterranean Sea instead, pipelines which presumably would pass through Israel or Israeli occupied territory on their way to the coast.
