As Israeli attacks on Gaza continue unabated, and Hamas fighters receive only modest armed support from Lebanon-based Hezbollah, another, somewhat unexpected, ally has stepped in to help the Palestinian armed group.
Just a few days ago, I predicted that the U.S. Navy’s successful interception of all missiles fired by the Yemeni Houthis toward Israel would discourage them from any future wastage of projectiles.
On Tuesday, I was proven wrong when the Houthis again launched cruise missiles and drones into Israel. They never had much chance of hitting anything: more than 2,000 km (1,240 miles) away, Israel is at the very edge of Yemen’s longer-range missiles.
And to reach Israel, Houthi missiles must first evade U.S. Navy ships patrolling the region that can shoot them down, and then Israeli Navy missile corvettes stationed in the Red Sea.
The Houthis are surely aware of the limitations of their equipment and know that even if a few were to slip through, they could only inflict nominal damage on their Israeli targets.
So why bother?
The answer is simple: by firing cruise missiles, they are not waging a military war but rather a political war. And the real target is not Israel but Saudi Arabia, the Houthis’ sworn enemy.
To understand this, it is necessary to look back at the history of Yemen and the rivalries in the Persian Gulf region.
Yemen experienced a revolution in 1962 that ended centuries of rule by sheikhs of the Zaidi Shiite sect. This profoundly changed the country. The northern highlands, with a Shiite majority, proclaimed the pro-Western Republic of North Yemen; their southern Sunni compatriots aligned themselves with the communist Eastern bloc as the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen.
Fast forward through a few civil wars, unifications and other divisions, and by 1990 there was a major divide between then-united Yemen and most of the Arab world. Yemen opposed intervention by non-Arab states to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait after President Saddam Hussein invaded Iraq’s smaller neighbor.
Saudi Arabia, which supported the American military intervention, responded by expelling nearly a million Yemeni workers from the kingdom. For Yemen, already a poor country, this meant additional economic difficulties.
Meanwhile, a long-running struggle for influence in the Middle East between Saudi Arabia and Iran has found a new theater in Yemen, where a full-scale civil war broke out in 2014. The two powers embroiled in the conflict: Riyadh, openly joining a loose Arab-African coalition; Iran does not send its own troops but fully supports the Houthis. Nearly 100,000 children died of starvation among the 400,000 who lost their lives to fighting or starvation in a war that proved to be one of the bloodiest conflicts for civilians of the 21st century.
This conflict has eased somewhat since last year, but Yemen still has two competing “governments,” neither of which has full control of the country.
One of them is the Iran-backed National Salvation Government, based in the capital Sanaa, which controls most of the territory. The other “government” nominally resides in the southern port of Aden, but its members spend their days in Riyadh, still claiming to be the only legitimate rulers.
Somewhat surprisingly, in March this year, Riyadh and Tehran responded to Sino-Iraqi mediation efforts and restored diplomatic relations after seven years. It is likely that both states wanted to defuse tensions in Yemen, but also take advantage of the easing to pursue their other strategic interests. Saudi Arabia had a big plan to normalize relations with Israel.
In this context, the October 7 Hamas attack on southern Israel was an unpleasant upset for Saudi Arabia. Days later, he reportedly told the United States that he was ending plans for a deal with Israel that Washington was trying to negotiate.
While Gaza was under attack, the only armed support for the Palestinians, however limited and timid, came from the Iranian proxy Hezbollah. The Houthi missile launches of October 19 appeared to be one-off. But the repeated, larger salvos earlier this week, while completely ineffective, potentially suggest a pattern: another Iranian-backed group joining the Palestinians’ fight.
At the same time, the White House said this week that “the Saudis have indicated their willingness to continue” work toward a normalization agreement with Israel. Saudi Arabia has not confirmed the White House’s claims.
Yet while there is some truth to the White House statement, the latest missile launches by the Houthis have made it more difficult than ever to make this plan a reality.