Houthis could have killed Israeli children. Israel can’t quell the Islamist threat alone
The Yemen-based group is flailing after regime change in Syria — and the moment is ripe for international action
The Houthis are lashing out after the collapse of their plans in Syria — but that doesn’t mean they’re strong. Photo by Mohammed Huwais / AFP / Getty Images
Columnist Dan Perry December 20, 2024
I was jolted awake at 2:30 a.m. Thursday morning by sirens echoing through my six-story apartment building in central Tel Aviv. Half-asleep, my neighbors and family trundled into the stairwell, a sort of safer space. Moments later, a thunderous explosion shook the city.
We went back to bed assuming that it had been just another interception, a routine event in the reality we now live. Wrong.
By morning, it emerged that a school in Ramat Efal, just four miles southeast of where I live, had been hit directly by a rocket fired by the Houthis, an Islamist group based in Yemen. The blast devastated the building, rendering it unusable. The school’s petting zoo was destroyed, and its animals, including rabbits and birds, were killed. Had the attack occurred during school hours, it would have slaughtered children instead.
That near miss should persuade the international order to finally, after the past decade or so of a Houthi-caused civil war that has led to the deaths of almost a half million people in Yemen, take decisive action to quash the group.
This should not be an issue for Israel — which has already launched a series of airstrikes against Houthi-controlled ports in Yemen in response to the early-morning strike — alone. It is a disgrace that the Houthis have been tolerated for so long, and time for a comprehensive strategy to counter the Houthi threat.
The Houthis, who emerged as a political and military force in Yemen in the 1990s, are a fanatical mafia that has fired a consistent barrage of missiles and drones at Israel since Oct. 7 — supposedly out of solidarity with the Palestinians — and badly disrupted global maritime container traffic with attacks on vessels headed to the Suez Canal. Like Hamas, in Gaza, they do not care about the consequences their actions might bring to Yemeni civilians. And they have spent a fortune on this madness, much of it provided by Iran, in a country in which the annual per capita GDP is around $600 — around 1% of Israel’s.
Because the threats they pose are so diverse, and touch so many different parts of global life, any international strategy to combat them must be multi-pronged. It should include, for a start, the following components:
- Sustained military campaigns to wipe out the Houthis’ missile capabilities and destroy their supply chains. One model for this effort could be Israel’s highly strategic and debilitating recent strikes against Hezbollah’s infrastructure in Lebanon.
- Enhanced maritime security to protect Red Sea shipping lanes. A multinational coalition must bolster naval patrols in the region to ensure the safety of commercial vessels. Disrupting the Houthis’ increasing control of this crucial strait will help diminish their power overall.
- Economic and diplomatic pressure, primarily through sanctions, targeting Houthi leadership and their Iranian sponsors.
- Addressing Yemen’s humanitarian crisis: The Houthis’ power thrives in the vacuum of Yemen’s failed state. Supporting reconstruction and governance in non-Houthi-controlled areas is crucial for undermining their influence.
Thursday morning’s strike is a sign of how urgent this work must be — because it’s conceivably a sign that, after being thwarted in Syria, the Houthis may be showing increasing desperation, which could make them newly dangerous.
The Houthis have, in recent months, deployed hundreds (and perhaps thousands) of their number to Syria, where their plan appears to have been to try to invade Israel through the Golan Heights, or possibly the Jordan border.
But after the fall of the dictator Bashar al-Assad, the new authorities in Syria appear intent on preventing any such thing. It is not clear exactly which members of the various militias Assad allowed to roam free in the country are still there — but it’s clear they are not welcome to cause more mayhem at this time. So in a sense, the missile attack could be seen as the Houthis’ howl against the dying of the jihadist light.
That would be ironic, of course, because the new Syrian authorities have their own Islamist ties — specifically through the al-Qaida affiliation of the dominant rebel group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, despite its efforts to paint itself as moderate. But the world remains suspicious, including because of the fact that the group ran an Islamist local government in the northern province of Idlib, which it controlled for years before the recent, astonishing upheaval.
That is why Israel has moved to destroy much of the Syrian military’s capabilities, and occupied a buffer zone on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights, previously occupied by a United Nations force, whose station it had been for 50 years. (Israeli officials say the latter measure is temporary, until the situation in Syria becomes more clear.)
But if Israel is going to help make sure that the fall of Assad means a real weakening of Islamist power tied to Iran throughout the Middle East, it’s going to have to develop a real strategic plan — for Syria, as for the Houthis.
Despite having a strong case for its actions, Israel continues to falter in its communication strategy; the government has so far failed to clearly articulate Israel’s security concerns regarding the new Syrian regime, or its rationale for engaging there.
In the end, there is a serious argument for the world taking one last stab at fixing the Middle East, however tired it may be of the region. The Houthis need to be crushed, and Syria should be nudged away from the Islamist “axis of resistance.” It is time, instead, for an axis of reason.
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