Houthis fire missiles at northern Israel

In the early hours of Wednesday, the Iran-backed Houthi rebels of Yemen, with their characteristic audacity, fired a missile aimed at northern Israel, as the Israeli military grimly confirmed. This is no ordinary skirmish; it is a rare escalation from a group that has already choked the lifeblood of global trade with its blockade of the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, all in the name of solidarity with the Palestinian cause—a cause stained by the blood of tens of thousands killed in Israel’s relentless war against another of Tehran’s proxies, Hamas, in Gaza.

The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), with their usual clinical precision, announced the attack via Telegram, noting that sirens wailed across Haifa, Krayot, and Western Galilee. “An interceptor was launched toward the missile, and the missile was most likely successfully intercepted,” they declared, betraying no hint of the chaos such an event might unleash.

This brazen act arrives against the backdrop of near-daily American strikes on the Houthis, a campaign unleashed by the Trump administration in mid-March to cripple their ability to menace U.S. vessels caught in their maritime stranglehold. 

The Houthis, undeterred, imposed this blockade in November 2023, barely a month after the Israel-Hamas war erupted on October 7, when Hamas’s savage surprise assault on Israel set the region ablaze. The Houthis, ever the loyal proxies of Iran, claim their blockade is a noble stand for the Palestinian people, whose Gaza homeland has been reduced to rubble by 18 months of unrelenting conflict.

A fleeting ceasefire in Gaza, secured in January, collapsed after a mere 42 days, and Israel has since resumed its merciless operations against Hamas in the shattered enclave. The Houthis’ missile, then, is not merely a projectile; it is a signal, a reminder that the Middle East remains a tinderbox, where the proxies of Tehran and the armies of Jerusalem clash with no end in sight.

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