Israel has struggled to stop Yemen’s Houthis because we have treated them like Hamas or Hezbollah, even though they are a fundamentally different adversary that is unusually hard to deter, as The Jerusalem Post’s Yonah Jeremy Bob has reported.
Early in the war, senior Israeli and American officials described the Houthis as “the craziest Iranian proxy in the region” and warned they were “virtually not deterrable,” according to Bob. That judgment still stands.
The Houthis are a guerrilla movement that spent years living in caves and deserts. Taking away creature comforts does not move them. As Bob noted, “Taking away some of their weapons, funds, and niceties is not going to reduce their standing lower than where they have been in the past.”
The record bears this out. From October 19, 2023, until July 2024, Israel largely avoided direct confrontation, relying on the United States to shoulder most of the burden. Only after a Houthi drone killed an Israeli civilian in Tel Aviv in July 2024 did Jerusalem authorize direct strikes in Yemen.
Fewer than two dozen counterstrikes followed, aimed at weapons stores, electricity infrastructure, and economic targets. The impact was fleeting. Sanaa was lit again soon after one of Israel’s most publicized strikes, and the Houthis kept firing, with total attacks likely surpassing 500 by now.
Why have familiar tools produced unfamiliar results? The Houthis are diffuse, mobile, and ideologically driven. They do not concentrate critical nodes the way Hamas built command centers in Gaza or Hezbollah invested in layered, centralized structures in Lebanon.
Yemen is vast, fractured, and difficult to penetrate. Israeli intelligence devoted decades to infiltrating Hezbollah and Iran, yet meaningful, large-scale HUMINT (human intelligence) and operational access in Yemen only began to take shape in mid-2024. When Donald Trump won the US election in November 2024 and later intensified American action before cutting a side arrangement with the Houthis, Israel’s own tempo paused, then restarted in spring 2025, again losing time.
If the diagnosis is that we are treating the wrong disease, the prescription must change. Israel should stop measuring success by temporary blackouts in Sanaa or repeat strikes on familiar targets in Hodeidah. The center of gravity is not a single power station or a single warehouse. It is the Houthis’ dispersed leadership, their internal logistics, and their cross-border finance and procurement networks. That requires patient, methodical intelligence work, the kind that prioritizes recruitment, technical access, and sustained mapping of decision-making circles.
How should Israel deal with the Houthis in Yemen?
Operationally, precision strikes must be paired with interdiction along maritime and overland routes, tighter financial pressure through partners in the Gulf and Africa, and persistent cyber and electronic warfare that degrades guidance and launch reliability. Once credible access is established, Israel should be prepared to act preemptively against leadership and enablers who matter, not merely to respond to launches after the fact.
Public messaging should also shift. Announcing grand “power-off” claims sets the bar in the wrong place and invites the Houthis to prove us wrong by flipping the lights back on.
This is not only about Yemen. The Houthis are Iran’s least sophisticated proxy. If Israel cannot curb sustained fire from Sanaa and Saada, Tehran’s stronger clients will draw their own conclusions. Restoring regional deterrence starts at the perceived periphery. Success against the Houthis would signal to Hezbollah, Iraqi militias, and others that Israel can adapt faster than its enemies.
None of this argues for disengaging from the US. On the contrary, close coordination with Washington and key Arab partners is essential for maritime interdiction, sanctions, and diplomacy that box in Houthi sponsors. It does mean, however, that Israel cannot subcontract core security problems or hinge its tempo on shifting American politics.
The lesson is straightforward. We underestimated an enemy that thrives on austerity, dispersion, and ideological fervor. We then tried to fix the problem with familiar tools that were never calibrated for this target.
The path forward is the long game: deeper infiltration, smarter targeting, steadier pressure, and fewer public boasts. Measure progress by fewer successful launches, longer gaps between barrages, and disrupted supply chains, not by how dark Sanaa gets for a night.
Treat the Houthis as the different enemy they are. Build the access, keep the pressure, and strike where it matters. That is how deterrence returns.