The Houthi’s ‘have been very happy’ to challenge Israel and the U.S.
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. [Continue reading…]