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Middle East Heating Up: Increased Hezbollah, Houthi Attacks on Israel after Israel Strike on Yemen Port,

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The intensification of Hezbollah’s and Yemen’s strikes against Israel feels like more than just a short-term uptick, but we’ll have to follow the pace over the upcoming week or more to be sure. But on the surface, it looks as if the Houthi and Hezbollah are ratcheting up their operations to a degree that this new campaign has good odds of being sustained.

For quick confirmation, see these news updates from The Hindustan and Times of India, both reputable outlets:

There appear to be additional Hezbollah strikes since the time of those videos:

Due to this account being based on breaking news, please forgive us for going a bit light on background.

The proximate cause of the Hezbollah strikes, as the Hindustan Times confirms in its segment headline above, is retaliation for the Israeli response against a Houthi drone attack on Tel Aviv last Friday. That was clearly a significant escalation from Israel’s perspective. It destroyed a house and resulted in a fatality.

The National, in Israel and Yemen braced for wider war after escalation of hostilities, recaps the Israel response of striking a Yemen port city, which among other things blew up fuel storage tanks. That port also receives humanitarian aid, and many reports singled out Israel as also intending to curb food supplies to Yemen, which has suffered from both food shortages and outbreaks of cholera during its war with the Saudis. From the National:

Houthi-controlled areas were bracing for the prospect of regular missile, drone and aerial attacks on Sunday, after the first Israeli air strikes in Yemen since the war in Gaza started.

Residents of Houthi-controlled Hodeidah woke up to palls of black smoke over their port city, while in Eilat, Israel, air-raid sirens sounded.

Both Yemenis and Israelis are now facing a wider war between the two countries.

A resident of Hodeidah told The National the entire city was engulfed in smoke, the density of which increased closer to the port hours after Israel’s counter-strike on Saturday. The attacks left fuel depots blazing, turning parts of the horizon fiery red and black.

One might wonder why Ansar Allah decided to attack Tel Aviv when it did, which was pretty much guaranteed to elicit Israel lashing back. I don’t think one has to look further than, “Because it could.”

The Houthis are set on punishing Israel and any sea carriers it reaches until Israel stops its genocide in Gaza, which Israel is absolutely determined to continue. The Houthis have been implementing new strategies with increasing success, such as low tech gambits like sending unmanned boats full of explosives into ships. But it has also been claiming to be upping its rocket game with new weapons. Whether they are indigenous or supplied by friends seems unimportant compared to the result, that the Houthis can and are inflicting more pain on Israel.

We have the question of why Hezbollah decided to up the ante now, particularly with Netanyahu appearing before Congress this week. Hezbollah increasing its attacks would seem to play directly into Netanyahu demanding US assistance.

But none other than the head of the Joint Chiefs, Charles Brown, has already told Israel that the US can do little to help. From the Jerusalem Times in late June:

Joint Chiefs of Staff head Charles Q. Brown warned on Monday that the US may not be able to help defend Israel against an all-out war with Hezbollah in the same way that it stepped in during the Iran drone attack in April.

That remark is even more fraught with meaning than it might appear.

In the armed exchange Brown is describing, Israel first hit an Iranian embassy compound in Beirut, killing seven officials, including a top member of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.

Iran and the US then effectively negotiated what the US presumed would be a face-saving retaliation. Iran would target only specified military sites. In other words, Israel and the US had full notice of what to expect.

Iran started out by sending a huge wave of very slow moving drones, all of which the US, Israel, and France took down. However, this response allowed Iran to identify where air defenses were operating from. Iran then sent in missiles. All of the ones targeting two airbases, which are supposed to be the best protected spots in Israel, got through. Scott Ritter, who worked extensively with the IDF in the 1990s, deemed this to be a decisive demonstration of Iran’s ability to penetrate combined US and Israel defenses even under textbook conditions for Israel.

So Israel ought to have worked out that it is not able to defend itself against a serious attack from Iran, bar nukes.

The US further underscored its message to Israel that “There’s really not much we can do” by asking Israel to ship eight Patriot systems to Ukraine, and also by telling all Patriot users that Ukraine was getting top priority in new missile deliveries. Even if the US and Israel both knew those systems were mothballed, Israel might still want them as backups or for parts. And the message about not being in the front of the line for new Patriot missiles was hard to misconstrue.

We are overdue on a post on the increasingly wobbly state of the Israel economy, but even in the Israel gung-ho Western press having to admit to growing military weakness. Admittedly, the most commentary comes from independent media. Former colonel Larry Wilkerson, in a remarkably round-about way, depicted Israel as having lost 10% of its forces, which is the threshold at which a force loses combat capability (not immediately, mind you, but the trajectory is baked in).1 Scott Ritter has pointed out that even though the level of reported IDF deaths is not terrible, the irrecoverable losses (as in serious injury) is very high. He adds the IDF was never a great force to begin with and restoring losses with new conscripts is not a winning proposition.

Israel has admitted to a tank shortage. From Elijah Magnier two days ago:

The commander of the Israeli occupation army, Herzi Halevy, has acknowledged a severe shortage of tanks and ammunition resulting from the prolonged conflict, putting pressure on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to call for an end to the already 10-month ongoing war. This marks the first time that the most powerful army in the Middle East has admitted to the significant loss of tanks, as well as the crews operating them and the commanders who were injured or killed in battles.

What is particularly striking is the announcement of the withdrawal of a substantial number of tanks from service and a lack of training programmes for personnel and the resources needed to maintain the tanks. According to a report published by the Israeli newspaper Maariv, Israel admits that more than 500 armoured vehicles of various types have been damaged since October 7, along with their crews inside. Meanwhile, Al-Qassam announced that it had hit more than a thousand tanks and armoured vehicles inside Gaza.

Recall that Hezbollah and Israel have been engaged in what until recently were tit for tat attacks in the border region, albeit at such a high level that (depending on who is counting) 60,000 to 100,000 settlers have left or been evacuated from Israel border towns, and are being housed at government expense. Hezbollah has said the strikes will cease only when Israel ends its war on Gaza.

Israel has cheekily demanded that Lebanon pull back to, as in abandon Lebanon up to the Litani River, supposedly to provide for settler peace of mind so they can return. Recall Israel only for a nanosecond got to the Litani in its failed 2006 war. Hezbollah’s chief Nasrallah has flatly rejected this ask, saying Lebanon will cede no territory to Israel.

Let us not forget that Lebanon has a long-standing grievance, that Israel occupies the formerly Lebanese Shebaa Farms area. Hezbollah was shelling that area regularly before October 7.

Additional accounts:

So propaganda videos like this are not entirely bluster:

Now after this perhaps long-winded intro, let us return to the Hezbollah part of the action. The definitely-not-Axis-of Resistance-sympathetic Sky News, Hezbollah is prepared for a war – and is changing its tactics against Israel amid global alarm contends that Israel has so far been out-matching Hezbollah in the border exchanges (since all the information appears to come from the Israel side, prudence suggests discounting it). The article still has some nice infographics and tidbits like:

When we join them, there seems to be an uptick in the tit-for-tat attacks between the Israeli military and the Iran-backed Lebanese Hezbollah fighting group.

It’s too early to reach any conclusions yet. But a first guess is that Ansar Allah is relentlessly escalating as its capabilities increase, while Hezbollah may sense opportunity. If nothing else, it is clearly not deterred by Netanyahu trying to shake more backing out of an overextended US.

_____

1 I can’t find the segment with Nima of Dialogue Work, but I did listen to the relevant section twice to make sure I heard it correctly. Wilkerson started by saying he had fresh information about IDF losses and without giving a number, implied they were worse than generally known. He then shifted immediately to a discussion of Operation Barbarossa. The main point there was the Germans lost 10% of their forces in that campaign, which was enough to seal their fate)

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5 comments

  1. Martin Oline

    Thanks Yves, this is a very timely piece and great work. Looking forward to the finished product but take your time. Events may overtake you.

    Reply ↓
  2. Paul Greenwood

    I am surprised that refinery in Haifa is still operational
    It was built by British to be at the end of an oil pipeline from Iraq but now gets fed Iraqi oil stolen by Kurds via Turkey or from Azerbaijan via Turkey

    Reply ↓
  3. ilsm

    Houthis are dispersed all the west can do is deliver fiery front page news pix. Spread humanitarian harm.

    Despite Patriot’s many flaws the ammunition plant in Tucson is quite busy.

    Zelensky is helping sell a new radar upgrade for “Patriot”.

    Patriot has a good future; lining the pockets……

    Reply ↓
  4. Aurelien

    Hezbollah’s strength has always been in defensive operations in a terrain they know well and where they have close links to parts of the local population. However, we’re now seeing a kind of lengthy war we haven’t seen before, which Hezbollah did not anticipate (nor did anyone else), and where they don’t have the same advantages. The IDF are using drones, together with their superior human and technical intelligence capabilities, to target Hezbollah commanders, and key weapons and logistics stocks. Hezbollah cannot reply effectively because it doesn’t have the same capabilities, and, after months of exchanges, many of the targets on the Israeli side of the border have been destroyed anyway.

    Those who follow Hezbollah say that, indeed, it has slowly been escalating its attacks. This seems by confirmed by a story in yesterday’s Al-Akhbar (“close to Hezbollah”) which strongly implies escalation but without giving details. The problem, of course, is too great an escalation could actually make an invasion of Lebanon inevitable, which is what neither Hezbollah nor Israel actually want.

    A small but important point: the withdrawal that’s being contemplated is of Hezbollah only, beyond the Litani river. The Lebanese Armed Forces and the UN would remain in position. This may not be feasible anyway, though, since many Hezbollah fighters live in Shia villages in the region, and keep their arms at home.

    Reply ↓
    1. Yves Smith Post author

      Alastair Crooke and Israeli’s own war games disagree vehemently with you. And Crooke has many top level contacts in the Muslim world. He maintains that Hezbollah and Iran have long prepared precisely for this sort of war of attrition, which Israel militarily and societally is not equipped to endure.

      Larry Wilkerson, who unlike you is a military man, knows the region, has actually met many of the key players, and gets some inside intel, has repeatedly said Israel is in deep trouble.

      Ritter points out that the last two Israel war games showed it losing in a big way to Hezbollah. And that was without the Houthis interfering with some supplies or a protracted war in Gaza.

      And if Iran comes in, Israel is wiped off the map.

      So I have no idea where your confident claims come from.

      Hezbollah does not want war because Lebanon is economically very fragile. But that consideration, although very important, is independent of the military equation.

      Reply ↓

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