Ever since Hamas launched its unprecedented cross-border assault on southern Israel nearly three years ago, Israelis have been acutely alert to the prospect of another surprise incursion along its borders.
In the immediate aftermath of the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack, attention turned to Hezbollah on the northern border, but recent comments have now raised fears that the most potent threat may actually be a more distant and possibly underestimated adversary: the Houthis in Yemen.
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Jonathan Ruhe, Fellow for American Strategy at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, said he was “surprised” at Zini’s reported warning.
While Ruhe did not doubt the Houthis’ intent to harm Israel, he questioned the group’s military capabilities to launch such an attack, noting that “they don’t really have any expeditionary capabilities.”
Still, he emphasized, “It’s important for everyone to keep in mind that things that seem fantastical once upon a time have all become real in the past couple years — in a post-October 7 world, anything is possible.”
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Ruhe said he would not rule out such a scenario, but that geographical constraints would limit a Houthi attack to a small-scale “terrorist-style raid” rather than a larger October 7-style combined-arms operation, due to the challenge of smuggling fighters from Yemen to Israel undetected. The 2,030-kilometer (1,260-mile) overland journey would require traversing Saudi Arabia and Jordan, neither of which is sympathetic to the group.
Comparing the Houthis to other Iranian terror proxies such as Hamas and Hezbollah, Ruhe said, “a big part of that threat is proximity… The Houthis just don’t have that level of access to Israel.”
“By the time the Houthis — assuming they’d be able to get that far — get all the way up to Israel, they’d be at the end of a pretty long road, and they wouldn’t be able to conduct a very large-scale attack,” he explained. Even a small ground incursion combined with missile and drone attacks would have limited effectiveness.
“Israel has shown by and large that they can handle that,” Ruhe said.
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Ruhe largely dismissed the threat of a naval attack by the Houthis.
“They don’t really have any sort of amphibious assault capability that would enable them to go the entire length of the Red Sea,” he said. “Amphibious operations are the hardest thing that any military can try to do,” Ruhe added, noting that even “the Israeli Navy would struggle to do an assault in the opposite direction.”
Large-scale Amphibious attacks require militaries to transport troops and heavy equipment across open water, land on often-defended coastlines and sustain forces on shore — a logistically and operationally complex operation that is uncommon in modern warfare.
Despite Ruhe’s skepticism towards the likelihood of a Houthi ground incursion, he did not rule out the threat of a future attack by the Yemen-based group or other Iranian proxies in the region, especially as Iran seeks to recreate its axis of resistance after surviving the US-Israeli attacks earlier in the year.
“The Iranians want [a ceasefire] now, but at some point they’ll be more than happy to — when it’s convenient or possible — try to rebuild Hezbollah, the Houthis, other proxies around the region, and get them ready to attack Israel again,” he warned.