Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the Israeli military struck Houthi targets in Yemen early Thursday in response to the militia’s attacks on Israel, and appeared to suggest that Israel might take further action in its campaign to weaken Iran-backed groups.
The announcement about the strikes — which killed nine people, according to Al-Masirah, a TV channel affiliated with the Houthis — came hours after Israel’s military said it had intercepted a missile launched from Yemen.
Israeli warplanes struck targets belonging to the Houthis on the “western coast and in inland Yemen,” the military said in a statement. Those included “ports and energy infrastructure” in the capital, Sana, it added in a later statement.
Al-Masirah reported that seven people died in a strike on the port city of Salif, while two others were killed at an oil facility nearby in Ras Isa. Both cities are in western Yemen, not far from the much larger port of Hudaydah, in a part of the country controlled by the Houthis.
Israel’s military said the strikes were aimed at preventing the Houthis from exploiting sites “for military and terrorist purposes, including the smuggling of Iranian weapons to the region.”
For more than a year, the Houthis have been attacking cargo vessels in the Red Sea in a campaign that they say is in solidarity with Palestinians under Israeli bombardment in Gaza.
Israel has since October 2023 waged war against Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon — both armed groups backed by Iran. Israel has conducted a devastating military campaign in Gaza to crush Hamas, which attacked Israel on Oct. 7 last year, and it also invaded Lebanon in October to prevent the militia group Hezbollah from staging cross-border attacks. After decimating much of the Lebanese militant group’s leadership, Israel in late November agreed to a cease-fire with Hezbollah.
That was seen as a blow to the regional influence of Iran, which cultivated a network of proxies in a so-called axis of resistance against Israel and the United States. The recent ouster of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, a longtime ally of Tehran, further weakened the network.
Mr. Netanyahu alluded to those significant regional shifts in a bullish statement on Thursday about the latest Israeli strikes — and appeared to hint at further action.
“After Hamas, Hezbollah and the Assad regime in Syria, the Houthis are almost the last arm of Iran’s axis of evil,” he said. “They are finding out, and will find out, the hard way that whoever harms Israel will pay a very heavy price.”
Iran’s Foreign Ministry on Thursday condemned the Israeli strike on Yemen. The ministry’s spokesman, Esmaeil Baghaei, described it as a blatant violation of international law and said that the United States was also complicit.
The United States and Britain have also launched a series of strikes against the Houthis, who are the de facto government in northern Yemen. But those moves appear so far to have failed to blunt the group’s capacity to stage attacks, which have disrupted global shipping.
In addition to targeting ships in the Red Sea, the Houthis over the past year have also fired missiles at Israel itself, which is more than 1,300 miles northwest of Yemen. Most of those missiles have been intercepted, according to the Israeli authorities. A drone strike on Tel Aviv in July, however, killed one person and injured others. In retaliation, Israel bombed Hudaydah.
On Thursday, Israel’s military said that the missile fired from Yemen overnight had been intercepted before crossing into the country’s territory. It said in a later statement that debris from the interception had most likely damaged a school in central Israel. No one was injured in the attack, according to Nadav Shoshani, a military spokesman.
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