Yemen’s Houthi rebels have attacked Israel with a barrage of ballistic missiles – their first such strikes since the United States-Israeli war on Iran began.
Brigadier-General Yahya Saree, a military spokesperson for the Houthis, announced the attack on Saturday on the rebels’ Al Masirah satellite television.
Strikes “will continue until the declared objectives are achieved, as stated in the previous statement by the armed forces, and until the aggression against all fronts of the resistance ceases”, Saree said.
The Israeli military said it intercepted one missile.
The attack came hours after Saree signalled in a vague statement on Friday that the rebels would join the war that has rattled the Middle East and shocked the global economy.
Saree said on Saturday the rebels fired a barrage of ballistic missiles targeting what he described as “sensitive Israeli military sites” in southern Israel.
Sirens went off around Beersheba and the area near Israel’s main nuclear research centre for the third time overnight Friday into Saturday as Iran and Hezbollah continued to fire on Israel. No casualties or damage were reported.
‘Battle in stages’
The Houthis have held Yemen’s capital Sanaa since 2014 and so far have stayed out of the US-Israeli war. The militia’s attacks on shipping vessels during the Israel-Hamas war upended commercial transit in the Red Sea, through which about $1 trillion worth of goods passes each year.
The Houthi rebels attacked more than 100 merchant vessels with missiles and drones, sinking two ships and killing four sailors, from November 2023 until January 2025.
In 2024, the Trump administration launched strikes against the Houthis that ended weeks later.
Mohammed Mansour, the Houthis’ deputy information minister, told local media on Saturday, “We are conducting this battle in stages, and closing the Bab al-Mandeb strait is among our options.”
Al Jazeera’s Yousef Mawry, reporting from Sanaa, said a potential naval blockade on Israel-linked ships passing through the Bab al-Mandeb strait would hurt Israel’s economy, as about 30 percent of its imports pass through the waterway in the Red Sea.
The involvement of the Houthis in the US-Israeli war on Iran would complicate the deployment of the USS Gerald R Ford, the aircraft carrier that went to port in Crete on Monday for repairs.
Sending the carrier back into the Red Sea could draw it into the same high tempo of attacks seen by the USS Dwight D Eisenhower in 2024 and the USS Harry S Truman in the 2025 American campaign against the Houthis.
‘Significant’ strike
Mohamad Elmasry, a professor of Media Studies at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, described the Houthis entering the US-Israeli war on Iran as “very significant”.
“We have seen over the past two and a half years that Houthis have significant power,” Elmasry told Al Jazeera.
“If they decided to move to shut down Bab al-Mandeb strait, the Red Sea and, ultimately, the Suez Canal, then we would have two major choke points [closed] along with the Strait of Hormuz,” he said.
“These are major international shipping waterways for international trade, so I think it can be very significant from that standpoint.”
Ibrahim Jalal, a senior researcher on Yemen and the Gulf, said the threat to shipping around Yemen is “very alarming especially when it’s compounded by a coordinated multi-strait blockade”.
“This is exactly the theatre that Iran has been preparing for from what we have seen in the past few years with the Houthis,” he said.
Al Jazeera’s Nida Ibrahim, reporting from the occupied West Bank, said the opening of a new front in the war, in addition to fighting Iran and Hezbollah, is likely to raise further questions in Israel “on the viability of the operations and the way the government is conducting its war”.
“We are expecting Israel to retaliate to this attack as we have seen them do time and again when Yemen joined the battle during the war in Gaza as a way to support the Palestinians,” she said.— Al Jazeera
