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Are the Houthis a Direct Threat to Israel’s Security?
People gather near burning Israeli and US flags, as supporters of the Houthis rally to denounce air strikes launched by the US and Britain on Houthi targets, in Sanaa, Yemen, Jan. 12, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah
The ongoing Israel-Hamas war (dubbed by Israel the Swords of Iron War) has seen the materializing of what has been until now a vague and somewhat imaginary-seeming threat from the Yemeni Houthi regime. The Houthis (or, more precisely, the Houthi movement, which was named after its founder, Hussein Al Houthi) is an extremist Shia Islamist movement that wrested control of the mountainous region of Yemen from the previous pro-Western government by capturing the capital city of Sana’a in 2015.
Following this coup, the Houthi movement proclaimed itself the legal government of the entire country. Like Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, the movement has a civilian arm that deals with civil affairs and welfare, as well as a military arm — one that is now indistinguishable from a regular army.
The Houthis practice Yazidi Islam, which is a branch of global Shia Islam. Yazidi Muslims ruled Yemen for nearly a millennium until they were deposed in 1962 by a revolt by an Arab nationalist faction. Thus, the capture of Sana’a by the Houthis and reestablishment of Yazidi control over part of the country can be viewed as a counterrevolution that restored Yemeni Shias to their former position. Yemeni Shias constitute about 65% of the population of northern Yemen.
The extremism of the Houthi movement is reflected in its flag, which, true to its faith, bears no graven images. Instead, it features a five-line slogan: “God is great, Death to America, Death to Israel, A Curse Upon the Jews, Victory to Islam.” It is hardly surprising that the ayatollahs of the Islamic Republic of Iran embraced the Houthi movement from the day of its establishment in 2004, and have supported it ever since with ample funds and arms.
Soon after the capture of Sana’a in 2015, a Sunni Arab coalition of nations headed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates embarked on a military campaign to oust the Houthi regime and reinstate the previous, internationally-recognized government of Yemen (which still controls parts of southern Yemen). The Arab coalition military campaign against the Houthi regime continued until a temporary ceasefire was achieved in April 2022.
During the seven years of warfare, Iran supported the Houthi regime to the hilt, copiously supplying it with money, arms, and military expertise and training by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corp and Lebanese Hezbollah. Circumventing the UN Security Council embargo on arming the Houthi regime, the Revolutionary Guards flooded their protégés with light arms, ammunition, rockets, missiles, and UAVs. Moreover, the Iranians delivered machinery and know-how to the Houthi regime to help it establish local defense industries that now provide the Houthi armed forces with some of its equipment, including UAVs and possibly some types of missiles and rockets.
Iran used the Yemen war to test its indigenously designed weapons systems — but at the same time, showed sensitivity to the UN embargo. This is shown by the lengths to which the Iranian regime went to dissociate itself from its arms supply to the Houthi regime. To this effect, they made efforts to disguise the Iranian origin of their supplied armaments. In some cases, the effort was superficial, like painting Houthi-destined ballistic missiles different colors from the Iranian originals. More frequently, the effort was significant and profound.
The prime example of a sophisticated dissociation effort was the development by Iran of UAVs and rockets tailored specifically for Houthi use — that is, not to be used by Iran’s own armed forces (at least at first). The claim was made that these weapons were indigenous Yemeni designs. A case in point is the rudimentary cruise missile Quds 1, first unveiled at a Sana’a arms expo in July 2019. There is clear evidence that the missile was designed and developed in Iran, but the Houthi regime bragged that the weapon had been indigenously designed and produced in Yemen. The Iranians, meanwhile, surreptitiously used the weapon operationally to attack the Saudi oil industry while avoiding displaying it at their own military parades and expos until 2023, when they finally featured it under a different name. The Iranians continue to maintain the fiction that they are complying with the UN embargo, and that the modern and deadly UAVs and missiles used by the Houthis were indigenously designed and built in Yemen by Yemeni scientists and engineers.
During the seven-year war in Yemen, the Houthis launched a significant campaign against Saudi Arabia that included attacks by rockets, ballistic missiles, and UAVs on population centers, military bases, industrial plants, and state symbols. Most of the attacks targeted the southern provinces of Saudi Arabia that border Yemen. Saudi Arabia’s hinterland also came under attack, and its capital city of Riyadh was hit at least eight times by Iran-supplied, Houthi-operated ballistic missiles and UAVs. Oil installations deep within Saudi territory were also subjected to mainly long-range UAV and cruise missile attacks, including the oil terminals at the port of Jeddah, the oil pipeline that connects the oil fields of northern Saudi Arabia to the Red Sea ports, and to oil fields like Shaiba in the eastern part of the Kingdom.
The United Arab Emirates, too, was a victim of several missile and UAV attacks from Houthi-controlled Yemen. These attacks targeted the construction site of the UAE’s nuclear power reactor and Abu Dhabi as well as the Dubai and Abu Dhabi airports. In the most recent attack in January 2022, Houthi-launched UAVs and missiles caused several casualties in an Abu Dhabi suburb. The Saudi Armed Forces spokesperson disclosed in December 2021 that a total of 851 UAVs and 430 rockets and ballistic missiles had been launched by the Houthis against Saudi targets since the start of the Yemen war in 2015.
The longest range reached by Houthi missiles during the Yemen war was about 1,200 km. How far their UAVs and cruise missiles struck is not precisely known, but it seems that their maximum range was about 1,000 km. At the time of the ceasefire, the Houthi regime had in its possession a significant arsenal of long-range weapons that could threaten the entire territory of Saudi Arabia. Their range was not, however, sufficient to hit Israel, the southernmost point of which is about 1,700 km away from the nearest point in Yemen.
Several Israeli analysts foresaw that once the war with Saudi Arabia abated, the Houthi regime would turn its long-range capabilities against Israel. One clear warning of Houthi intentions was provided by a video clip released by the Houthi regime in 2019 that featured the newly unveiled Quds 1 cruise missile. This propaganda video had Hebrew subtitles threatening Israel, ending with the words — in Hebrew — “In the future, many more (missiles).” It was clear that the range gap could be bridged by extending the reach of the cruise missile and introducing heavier ballistic missiles.
As predicted, extended-range missiles were unveiled at a military parade held in Sana’a on September 22, 2023, barely two weeks before the Hamas attack on Israel and subsequent outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war. At the parade, the Houthis unveiled two new missile types: the Quds 4 cruise missile, which has a longer range than earlier variants (the exact range was not specified); and a new, larger ballistic missile dubbed the “Toufan” that was clearly the 1,900 km Iranian Ghader F — an extended-range version of the liquid propellant Shahab 3. Since the Houthis don’t need missiles with ranges beyond 1,200 km to threaten Saudi Arabia, it was clear that the intended target of the two new missiles was Israel.
This threat first materialized on October 19, 2023, when a salvo of UAVs was launched from Yemen towards Israel. This salvo was apparently intercepted and destroyed by US warships stationed in the Red Sea. In another attack on October 27, some Yemeni-launched UAVs reached the Gulf of Aqaba. Two of them struck towns in Egyptian Sinai and others were shot down by Israel Air Force (IAF) fighter aircraft. Four days later, a Houthi-launched ballistic missile that targeted Eilat, Israel’s southernmost city, was intercepted and destroyed by the Arrow anti-missile system. Subsequently, two more Houthi-launched ballistic missiles were destroyed by Arrow interceptors well before they could hit Eilat. Further UAV attacks were foiled by the IAF, and from video footage released by the IAF of these interceptions, it seems the intercepted threats were Quds 4 cruise missiles. According to media reports, some of the UAVs launched against Israel were intercepted and destroyed by Saudi Air Defense command.
The impression is that while the nominal range of the Quds 4 cruise missile covers southern Israel, including Eilat and points north, in real life its range is only marginally sufficient to reach Eilat. One clue suggesting this to be true is the debris of a Houthi cruise missile found in the deserts of southern Jordan, about 200 km short of Eilat. It might have failed to reach Eilat because of a technical glitch, but it also might have run out of fuel earlier than anticipated.
It appears that Israel’s Air Defense Command prepared in time to face potential missile threats from Houthi Yemen. This has enabled it (with the help of the US Navy) to parry all Houthi-launched cruise and ballistic missile attacks up to now. At the same time, there is little doubt that the Houthis, aided by their Iranian patrons, will make further efforts to improve their performance and break through the defensive arrays of the US Navy and Israel’s Air Defense Command (and probably that of Saudi Arabia’s air defense too). The Houthi regime formally declared war on Israel on October 31, 2023, so it stands to reason that it will persist in its efforts to hit Israel with its missiles, both to show solidarity with Hamas, a fellow Iranian proxy, and to dilute Israel’s air defenses against the rockets, missiles and UAVs of Hamas and Hezbollah.
The Houthi missile threat is clearly destined to become a permanent feature of Israel’s missile threat environment. Israel’s Air Defense Command will probably redeploy its assets for instant readiness against the threat from the south, a threat that has now became as tangible and dangerous as the missile threats from Gaza and Lebanon.
Dr. Uzi Rubin, a senior researcher at The BESA Center, is a former founder and director of the Arrow project in the Defense Ministry and an expert on missile defense systems. A version of this article was originally published by The BESA Center.
The post Are the Houthis a Direct Threat to Israel’s Security? first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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‘Patently Falsified’: Hamas Deletes Thousands From Gaza Death List, Including Over 1,000 Children
Palestinian fighters from the armed wing of Hamas take part in a military parade to mark the anniversary of the 2014 war with Israel, near the border in the central Gaza Strip, July 19, 2023. REUTERS/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa
Hamas has quietly removed thousands of names from its official casualty reports in Gaza, prompting fresh scrutiny of the accuracy of the death toll figures that have been widely cited by media and international organizations since the start of the Palestinian terrorist group’s war with Israel.
An analysis, conducted by Salo Aizenberg of the US-based nonprofit Honest Reporting and first reported on by the Telegraph, revealed that 3,400 individuals listed as killed in earlier updates released by the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health in August and October 2024 no longer appear in the March 2025 report. Among those missing from the latest list are 1,080 children.
“Hamas has manipulated the number of fatalities they report since the start of the war, overcounting civilian deaths and concealing combatant losses,” Aizenberg told The Algemeiner.
“I took all the unique deaths and ID numbers from the August and October lists. I combined them. I removed duplicates and then compared it to the March list. And there were 3,400 names that didn’t appear,” he said. “In my mind, the 1,080 children are particularly notable.”
Aizenberg said the systematic inflation of civilian death tolls by Hamas is not a new phenomenon. “They have done this in every round of conflict. For example, in 2009’s Cast Lead, Hamas initially claimed that 1,300 Palestinians died and only about 50 were combatants. Months later Hamas admitted that in fact 600-700 were their fighters,” he said.
The casualty lists compiled by the Gaza Ministry of Health are distributed as downloadable PDFs and include personal details such as names, identification numbers, and dates of death. These lists have been widely cited by international media and relied upon by humanitarian groups and United Nations agencies monitoring the toll of the war. The health ministry is under the control of Hamas, which governs the Gaza Strip.
The discrepancy in figures has raised questions about the continued reliance on these data sets, especially given mounting evidence of inconsistencies.
“The evidence is now all out there in the public domain,” Andrew Fox, a former British paratrooper who has worked with Aizenberg on data-verification projects in the past, told The Algemeiner. “These Hamas numbers are error-strewn and clearly manipulated.”
Aizenberg built databases by converting the PDF lists into spreadsheets, allowing for comparative analysis across different time points. That process revealed the March 2025 report included significantly fewer names than earlier versions. The findings cast doubt on previously unchallenged casualty estimates.
Hamas has claimed that more than 50,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the war began in October 2023. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it has killed 20,000 Hamas combatants during that time and maintains that it takes extensive precautions to avoid civilian casualties. “The IDF has never, and will never, deliberately target children,” the IDF said in a statement.
According to a December report authored by Fox and published by the Henry Jackson Society, nearly half of those killed in Gaza are combatants, directly contradicting claims that the vast majority of casualties are civilians. The report also pointed to demographic inconsistencies, including the repeated listing of women and children to support allegations of indiscriminate attacks, and the lowering of adult men’s ages to inflate the number of minors reported killed.
“You can’t say it’s a genocide when half the people that have died are combatants who are still fighting,” Fox told The Algemeiner at the time.
The debate over casualty figures was intensified by a February 2025 article published in the medical journal The Lancet, which estimated that Gaza’s true death toll could be as high as 64,000. That estimate was based on a statistical extrapolation using “capture-recapture” methods applied to a subset of the ministry’s data. The researchers behind the study said they only used what they called “hospital-recorded deaths” from June 2024 and asserted that these records were the most verified.
But Aizenberg said that claim does not hold up to scrutiny. He reviewed the same June dataset used by the Lancet study and found that 881 names in that core group were later removed in the March update. In his view, this undermines the foundation of the statistical model used to estimate excess mortality.
“They do this very careful statistical analysis, taking three lists and doing capture, recapture from vetted lists of hospital recorded deaths,” Aizenberg said. “And then I took their June list that they used again [in the February report] and I found 881 were also removed from the March list. So even after a really careful study [its] core data sources are not valid.”
Past reports have noted that the casualty forms used to populate the lists could be submitted online by anyone with access to a Google Form, raising concerns about verification protocols.
Despite these issues, some international entities, including the United Nations, and news outlets have continued to cite the figures from the Gaza Ministry of Health, occasionally with the disclaimer that the numbers could not be independently confirmed.
Fox said such caveats are insufficient and that the deletions from Hamas’s own published records have, in his view, stripped away any plausible justification for continuing to rely on the ministry’s figures. “It is malpractice and deeply irresponsible on the part of any media organization still using them. There is simply no excuse for repeating them as credible,” he said.
The post ‘Patently Falsified’: Hamas Deletes Thousands From Gaza Death List, Including Over 1,000 Children first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Most Americans Agree With Deporting Mahmoud Khalil, Foreign Students Who ‘Support’ Terror Groups, Poll Finds
Mahmoud Khalil speaks to members of media about the Revolt for Rafah encampment at Columbia University during the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in Gaza, in New York City, US, June 1, 2024. Photo: Jeenah Moon via Reuters Connect
About two-thirds of the American people support the deportation of non-citizen students, such as Mahmoud Khalil, who indicate support for internationally recognized terrorist groups, according to a new Harvard CAPS/Harris poll.
The poll — conducted from March 26-27 among registered US voters — was released amid ongoing furor over the Trump administration’s sweeping arrests and detainments of non-citizen students who have allegedly expressed support for terrorist organizations, primarily Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, and in many cases participated in raucous, often destructive and unsanctioned anti-Israel demonstrations on university campuses.
According to the newly released data, most Americans, 63 percent, believe that the Trump administration should “deport” foreign students who “voice support” for terrorist groups like Hamas, while a slightly higher 67 percent want such deportations for non-citizens on campuses who “actively support” such terrorist groups. About one-third of voters in each case said they believe the students should stay in the US.
Meanwhile, the data showed that 63 percent of Americans believe the Trump administration should revoke permanent resident status for “pro-Hamas activists like Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia University,” compared to 37 percent who indicated the government should not be able to revoke one’s green card in such circumstances.
Khalil, who was born in Syria and came to the US in 2022, was one of the leaders of the anti-Israel encampment at Columbia University last year, when activists illegally seized parts of the campus and refused to leave unless the school boycotted the world’s lone Jewish state. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained him early last month for what the Department of Homeland Security alleged to be leading “activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.” Khalil, who became a permanent US resident last year, is fighting his deportation in court and arguing the government is violating his civil rights.
However, a striking 69 percent of respondents in the Harvard CAPS/Harris poll said the federal government should “have the authority to revoke the green card of a permanent legal resident and deport them if it can prove that such a person actively supported a terrorist organization like Hamas.” By comparison, 31 percent said the government should not have such authority.
Republicans overwhelmingly support the deportation of non-citizens who indicate support for terrorist groups, with 83 percent claiming that those who “voice support” for terrorist groups should be removed from the country and 84 percent responding that non-citizen students who “actively support” terrorist groups should be deported.
In contrast, only 42 percent of Democrats said they endorse deportation for foreign students who voice support for terrorist groups, compared to 58 percent who want them to stay on US spoil. Meanwhile, a slight majority, 51 percent, indicated the government should deport those who “actively support” such extremist organizations, while 49 percent oppose deportation in such circumstances.
As for green card holders such as Khalil who allegedly support Hamas, 82 percent of Republicans said the Trump administration should be able to revoke their permanent resident status, compared to just 48 percent of Democrats. Only 18 percent of Republicans oppose the revocation of green cards in these cases, just a fraction of the 52 percent of Democrats who feel the same way.
More broadly, a striking 86 percent of Republicans believe the government should have the authority to revoke the green card of a permanent legal resident and deport them if they actively supported a terrorist group like Hamas, while 14 percent oppose such a measure.
By comparison, just 55 percent of Democrats support deportation and the taking away a green card in such a situation, compared to 45 percent who oppose it.
In recent weeks, the Trump administration has detained several non-citizen anti-Israel activists on university campuses for participating in often destructive demonstrations while allegedly supporting Hamas, the US-designated terrorist organization that has ruled Gaza since 2007. Some of these arrests, particularly of Khalil, have sparked significant backlash, with critics accusing the White House of undermining free speech rights.
During the 2024 US presidential election, as part of a broader effort to entice Jewish voters, Trump vowed to deport foreign supporters of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas if elected to office.
“We will deport the foreign jihad sympathizers, and we will deport them very quickly. And Hamas supporters will be gone,” Trump said during a “Stop Antisemitism” event in August. “If you hate America, if you want to eliminate Israel, then we don’t want you in our country. We really don’t want you in our country.”
The post Most Americans Agree With Deporting Mahmoud Khalil, Foreign Students Who ‘Support’ Terror Groups, Poll Finds first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Harvard Sanctions Pro-Hamas Group Over Unauthorized Demonstration Led by Reinstated Students
Harvard University students Prince Williams and Kojo Acheampong leading unauthorized demonstration at Harvard Yard on April 1, 2025. Photo: The Algemeiner.
Harvard University has imposed disciplinary sanctions on the pro-Hamas student group Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC) following its staging an unauthorized demonstration, placing it on probation and suspending its privilege to hold campus events until long after the end of this academic year.
The measure, announced on Wednesday, brings PSC operations to a halt, The Harvard Crimson reported, as the group planned to hold eight events in the month of April alone. Harvard told the paper that PSC’s own actions prompted the severe response from the administration. The group, it said, used “amplified sound” during Tuesday’s protest outside University Hall, obstructed university business, and invited an unrecognized group, Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine (HOOP), to participate in the demonstration.
PSC lambasted Harvard on Wednesday, arguing in a statement posted on Instagram that the administration “sanctioned PSC without clarifying what relation, if any, it had to the rally.”
It continued, “We call on all student organizations to stand with the movement for Palestine — silence will not save us. Demand that Harvard: defend academic freedom, protect its students from [US Immigration and Customs Enforcement], and divest from genocide.”
Harvard’s swift sanctioning of PSC came just days after the Trump administration announced that $9 billion in federal contracts and grants awarded to the school will be considered for termination because of allegations that it has failed to meaningfully respond to the campus antisemitism crisis.
PSC’s cheering of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, atrocities across southern Israel, which included sexual assault and murder, are in part responsible for placing the university at the center of the debate on antisemitism and left-wing extremism in higher education
Beyond sanctioning the campus group, Harvard has recently taken other steps that appear driven by the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy for campus antisemitism. Last month, it fired a librarian whom someone filmed ripping posters of the Bibas children, two babies murdered in captivity by Hamas, off a kiosk in Harvard Yard and denounced him as “hateful.” Additionally, it paused a partnership with a higher education institution located in the West Bank, a move for which prominent members of the Harvard community and federal lawmakers had clamored in a series of public statements.
However, an Algemeiner investigation has uncovered that Tuesday’s demonstrations at Harvard were made possible by steps the university refused to take after PSC convulsed the campus with disruptions and occupations of school property during the 2023-2024 academic year.
Two ringleaders of the protest — Prince Williams and Kojo Acheampong — are among several undergraduates who the university suspended and then promptly reinstated for their roles in organizing a November 2023 unauthorized demonstration in which Williams led a chant of “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” — a popular slogan among anti-Israel activists that has been widely recognized as a call for the destruction of the Jewish state, which is located between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
Williams also participated in the May 2024 occupation of Harvard Yard, which he attended while his disciplinary case was being processed.
A recipient of a full scholarship to attend Harvard, Williams announced his reinstatement to good standing in July 2024, proclaiming: “When I rejoin my peers in the fall, we must understand that our movement is working, that our momentum is growing, and that Palestine will be free from the river to the sea.”
His partner, Acheampong, previously participated in a “Student Intifada” event, in which he heralded Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel as “a really pivotal moment in the struggle” that pro-Hamas activists should “prepare” to welcome again. Acheampong added, “The broader task is to make Zionism untenable for the ruling class.”
Since the Oct. 7 atrocities, Harvard students and faculty have quoted terrorists, shared antisemitism cartoons, and mobbed a Jewish student, screaming “Shame! Shame! Shame!” into his ears. Such incidents have led federal lawmakers, Jewish civil rights activists, and others to argue that Harvard has not done enough to combat a surge in antisemitism on campus amid the Israel-Hamas war.
Williams, for example, has promoted a conspiracy theory which links Israel to lingering inequalities affecting African Americans in the US. Writing in November 2023 for the Crimson, for which he worked as an “editorial editor,” he said, “Black and Palestinian liberation go hand in hand … when we see repression for Black lives in places like Ferguson we also have to think about the Israeli police and the Israeli army.”
In another op-ed published by the Crimson, Williams endorsed the self-immolation and suicide of Aaron Bushnell in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC, arguing that students should “remember him” and “join the mass movement for Palestine that is working each day on the right side of history.”
Harvard’s harboring of extremists is harming its image, US Secretary of Education Linda McMahon explained on Monday in a statement which announced the Trump administration’s review of its federal contracts and grants.
“Harvard has served as a symbol of the American Dream for generations” McMahon said. “Harvard’s failure to protect students on campus from antisemitic discrimination — all while promoting divisive ideologies over free inquiry — has put its reputation in serious jeopardy. Harvard can right these wrongs and restore itself to a campus dedicated to academic excellence and truth-seeking, where all students feel safe on its campus.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Harvard Sanctions Pro-Hamas Group Over Unauthorized Demonstration Led by Reinstated Students first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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