The Houthis’ Dream Come True

The Houthi militia, born in the wilds of northwestern Yemen, has been wanting a war with Israel for decades. Its distinctive five-line motto, printed on flags and chanted at rallies by the group’s faithful, includes the lines “Death to Israel” and “Curses on the Jews.”

The Houthis got their wish on July 19, when one of their drones struck a high-rise in Tel Aviv, killing one man and wounding four others. The blast signaled a troubling new reality: Already embattled with Hamas in the south and Hezbollah in the north, Israel is now fighting yet another Islamist group, one that has succeeded—however modestly—in penetrating its fabled air defenses.

The Houthis are not a threat just to Israel, which promptly retaliated with air strikes on a Houthi-controlled Red Sea port. They have grown steadily more dangerous and volatile in recent months. They have maintained and even stepped up their attacks against commercial shipping in the Red Sea—ostensibly in support of Gaza—despite a large-scale U.S.-military effort to stop them. In a dramatic video that surfaced on July 20, Ukrainian guards on the deck of a container ship in the Red Sea fired at an unmanned “suicide boat” streaming toward them, until it exploded in a ball of fire. The top U.S. commander in the Middle East recently issued an alarming report saying that the military effort to constrain the Houthis is failing and must be expanded.

The group, which seized the capital city of Sana’a a decade ago, has also made warlike gestures closer to home, arresting scores of people who work for the United Nations and other organizations in Yemen in recent weeks, and opening violent skirmishes with rivals in the country’s south. In mid-July, it got Saudi Arabia to make a humiliating retreat in a financial-sanctions dispute by threatening to attack it.

All of this has set back long-standing efforts to reach a regional peace deal between the Houthis and their neighbors, according to Tim Lenderking, the U.S. special envoy for Yemen. “Pressure is building to designate the Houthis as a foreign terrorist organization,” Lenderking told me. The U.S. government currently categorizes the Houthis at a lower level of terrorist activity; designating them as a foreign terrorist organization, as the Trump administration did, would have serious consequences for them, including heavier sanctions.

The Gaza war has been a great boon to the Houthis, who had been facing some domestic resistance before it broke out. The Houthis’ staunch public support for Gaza has helped them recruit new soldiers at home and maintain their immense popularity across the Arab world. That popularity has translated into much-needed financial contributions (though not nearly enough to meet the needs of the Yemeni people).

The Houthis’ rise to power has been so swift that it is still baffling, even to Yemenis. Twenty years ago, they were an obscure rebel group in Yemen’s remote northwest, fueled by feelings of historic entitlement and oppression. They took advantage of their enemies’ corruption and ineptitude and cannily allied with Iran, which has provided essential weapons and military training.

[Read: The Houthis are very, very pleased]

But the group’s power is partly a measure of its neighbors’ extreme vulnerability. One successful missile strike on a Dubai hotel or a Riyadh conference center is a devastating reputational blow, worth billions of dollars in lost business and tourist revenue. The Houthis have no such worries; they are accustomed to being bombed, and revel in martyrdom. They are also used to living in caves.

Only a few months ago, United Nations negotiators were voicing guarded optimism that if the Gaza war wound down, they could finalize a deal to end the conflict between the Houthis and their Saudi neighbors, which started in 2015. (The fighting has mostly been on hold since the parties reached a truce two years ago.)

That diplomatic effort, known as the “road map,” would provide incentives for the Houthis to find a modus vivendi with their rivals in southern Yemen, where the officially recognized (but very weak) Yemeni government is based. The road map would also provide money to help ease the suffering of the Yemeni people, who are heavily dependent on dwindling supplies of food aid from abroad.

But the road map threatened to reward the Houthis with legitimacy and large new revenue streams at the very moment when they were effectively blocking the waterway that carries 15 percent of the world’s trade. Maritime traffic through the Red Sea has dropped by almost 80 percent since the Houthis began attacking ships last November, and that was before they struck Tel Aviv on July 19, prompting the Israelis to bomb the city of Hodeida, on the Red Sea coast. Traffic has fallen further since.

The Houthis also appear to be evading international efforts to stop them from importing weapons. The British ambassador to the United Nations said in May that there has been a surge since October in vessels entering Houthi ports without submitting to required inspections. They’ve been using ever more sophisticated weapons since they started attacking ships in the Red Sea last year, and the situation could get worse. American intelligence officials have warned that Russia may arm the Houthis with advanced anti-ship missiles, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal, in retaliation for Ukraine strikes, using American weapons, on targets inside Russia.  

With the road map on hold, Yemen’s internationally recognized government, based in the southern port city of Aden, began making efforts in recent months to weaken the Houthis by cutting off their access to the international banking system. But the Aden-based government has no money and is utterly dependent on the Saudis. In July, the Houthis threatened to attack the Saudis if they did not put an end to the financial sanctions, and the Saudis quickly caved. The pattern has repeated itself again and again in recent years.

The Houthis have also been reorganizing the government they inherited when they took control of northern Yemen a decade ago, often in ways that suggest warlike intent. They have created a “general mobilization” force that appears to be modeled on the Basij, Iran’s youth paramilitary force, I was told by Mohammed Albasha, an analyst with Navanti, an international research and security company. “They are all trained to fight both domestic and foreign enemies, and to conduct surveillance—even on their neighbors, tribes, and friends,” he said.  

Where all this militancy will end is anyone’s guess. The Houthi leaders are isolated and inscrutable. One thing is beyond doubt: Their successful drone strike on Israel was a dream come true, and they seem reluctant to trade their militancy for desperately needed money. Their leader, Abdelmalik al Houthi, declared in a speech last week: “We have been very happy” to be involved directly in a war with Israel and the United States.