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المخبر الاقتصادي+ | لماذا تعجز إسرائيل عن ردع الحوثيين في اليمن رغم فارق القوة الضخم؟ | AJ+ كبريت | YouTubeToText
YouTube Transcript: المخبر الاقتصادي+ | لماذا تعجز إسرائيل عن ردع الحوثيين في اليمن رغم فارق القوة الضخم؟
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On September 7, 2025, the Israeli Ramon Airport,
located in the Negev region in southern
occupied Palestine, was struck by a Yemeni drone that successfully flew a
distance of more than 2,000 meters before
exploding in the passenger hall at the
Israeli airport, causing injuries to a number of
Israelis. The Israelis immediately opened an
investigation to find out how this drone
penetrated their air defenses, which are considered among the
most advanced and complex air defense systems
in the world, and reached its target without being
intercepted or even sounding the sirens.
How did this drone bypass the Israeli air defenses?
This is undoubtedly an important question, but there are
other questions that are more important and that take up a
large part of the Israelis’ thinking. These questions
include, for example, why the Israeli occupation has been unable,
until now, to deter the Ansar Allah group or the
Houthis in Yemen and force them to withdraw from the
so-called Gaza support battle, from which
other parties have already emerged that were theoretically considered stronger and
better armed than the Houthis. Why is the
Israeli army not… Able to stop Houthi attacks
despite the harsh strikes that Yemen has been exposed to
over the past two years, whether from Israel or the United
States and its allies, who launched
one of the most violent air strikes in the
current century against Yemen. In statements to the Israeli newspaper, Jerusalem Post,
Post,
senior Israeli and American officials described the Houthis as the
most insane party in the so-called axis of
resistance and warned that the Houthis practically
have no possibility of being subdued until the present moment. It
seems that the Israelis are unable to achieve their
desired goal in Yemen, which is to break the
Houthis’ will to fight and force them to stop
attacking the Israelis, whether from the sea or the
air. This is a mission that the Americans failed to achieve before them,
whether during the era of former US President
Joe Biden or the current President Donald
Trump. But apart from the issue of breaking the will, there is a
second important question that we must answer, which is how the
Houthis, who are stationed in Yemen, which is very poor
and burdened with sanctions, and which is separated from
occupied Palestine by a distance of nearly 2,000 meters,
and which they also, in the view of Most countries in the world are
illegitimate governments that are below the state level, and
they are able to pose a threat to Israel,
despite the existence of a huge arms gap between the two
sides. This is what we will try to answer together
in today’s episode. I am Ashraf Ibrahim, the
economic expert plus [music].
[music].
On April 27, 2025, the US Central Command
launched an air strike on the Thaqban area,
north of the Yemeni capital, Sanaa. The attack, which
killed a number of civilians, was one
of more than 800 attacks carried out by the US military from
mid-March until now against targets in
Yemen as part of its military campaign
called Rough Rider,
which aimed, according to
US President Donald Trump, to
completely eliminate the Houthis. But among all the attacks
launched by the Americans against the Houthis,
this Thaqban attack in particular was linked to a very
interesting and surprising incident. Well, how can I tell you that in
early April, about two weeks after the
launch of the US campaign against the Houthis
in Yemen, from an account on the X or Twitter platform, used
by the user Her name is Blakely Hound, she lives in the
Netherlands, she posted a tweet with the coordinates of a
location in Yemen and said that the place that
these coordinates point to is the location of an
underground Houthi military facility.
Weeks later, specifically on the evening of the 27th of the same month, the
American army launched an attack on the location
located in the coordinates that
Blakely pointed to and destroyed it over the heads of its residents, thinking that it was
targeting a Houthi military facility. But when
morning came, the American army and the whole world
discovered the surprise. It turned out that the site that was
targeted in Thaqban has nothing to do with the
Houthis or their military activity. It is just a
quarry where a number of Yemenis work,
living in simple homes inside or around it. The
American bombing destroyed it and killed a number of its residents.
As soon as this strike happened, it became clear that the
targeted place was civilian and not military. The owner of the
Flakely Hound account, who had published the coordinates, came out to
apologize and tell people in a tweet that she wrote on her
account, “Guys,
I had classified the quarry that the American army struck in Yemen
as an underground military base.” Based on
satellite images, I am certain that the
American leadership in the American army does not take
targeting data from Twitter, and despite that, I
made a grave mistake and then published a screenshot of two
donations totaling 500 euros to a
charitable foundation as atonement for her sin because her conscience
tells her that she might be the reason for the
American army killing innocent civilians because
he trusted her words and used the coordinates
that Flaky published. She concluded her words by saying, “What kind of
half-post?” This means that I should not have
published these coordinates, and she admitted that she
was not sure of them. The American army targeting the same
coordinates that
Flaky published could be a coincidence or not,
but what strengthens the possibility that the army relied
on these coordinates without verifying them is
that Flaky Hound’s account is known to officials in the
American army, according to an investigation conducted by the Drop
Site News website. This immediately leads us to the following logical question: Why
does the army, the strongest and most
advanced in the world, have at its disposal
enormous resources? It has no equivalent, relying on coordinates
written on Twitter to target a target in Yemen. The
simple answer is intelligence work. The Americans do not have
sufficient Emirati intelligence information
regarding valuable Houthi targets, so they are confused and
work on information that may be
unreliable or from the Internet, literally from the beginning of the
American attack on the Houthis in
Yemen in January 2024 during the Biden era until it
ended with the end of Operation Rough Rider in May
2025 during the Trump era. The main challenge
facing the American military is its lack of
sufficient intelligence information to enable it to
target the Houthis
effectively. In a hearing held by the
US Senate weeks after the launch of the
attack on the Houthis in Yemen, specifically on
February 27, 2024, Daniel Shapiro, who was
then the Pentagon’s senior official for
Middle Eastern affairs, said in response to Senator
Chris Murphy, who was doubting the ability of
air strikes to deter the Houthis: We
know to some extent the extent of the Houthi capabilities that
We eliminated them and those who used them, but we do not
know the extent of their remaining capabilities, and this is something
we will try to work on in the coming days. The
British Financial Times quoted
American officials as saying that the US military’s efforts to
deter the Houthis are being hampered by a lack of
intelligence about the Houthi arsenal and their
full capabilities. In the same context,
Ted Singer, a former senior official in the
American Central Intelligence Agency, told
the Financial Times that the Houthis are careful to
store their weapons in very rugged areas, and that
obtaining field intelligence
in Yemen has become more difficult since
the United States evacuated its embassy in Sanaa
in 2015, coinciding with the Houthis’ control of
the capital. According to him, preparing
intelligence reports on a country like Yemen from afar
or from outside it is very difficult. The challenge of
this lack of intelligence
was certainly not overlooked by the US military when it
decided last March to renew its attack on the
Houthis, by order of the new US President,
Donald Trump, within the framework of Operation
Rough Rider. The US military has been using the
famous American MQ-9
Reaper drones for surveillance, reconnaissance, and
intelligence gathering in the skies over Yemen.
However, these efforts faltered and faced challenges after the
Houthis succeeded in shooting down at least seven
MQ-9 drones in the first 30 days
of the US campaign. This inflicted
losses on the Americans exceeding $200 million,
given that a single drone of
this vintage costs close to $30 million. However,
apart from the cost, the Houthis’ success in shooting down the
MQ-9 posed a bigger problem for the
US military because it hindered almost the only way
available to it to monitor the Houthis
and gather information about them, given that it did not have
any ground forces on the ground there.
Last April, US officials told CNN
that the US military planned to achieve
air superiority in the skies over Yemen during the first 30 days of the
campaign by neutralizing and weakening the Houthi air defense systems
in a way that would allow
US reconnaissance aircraft to fly freely over
Yemen for the purpose of reconnaissance and intelligence gathering.
The necessary steps were taken to monitor, punish,
target, and kill senior Houthi leaders,
but according to what they told the American network,
this did not happen, and the US military never reached
the next phase of the campaign due to the
Houthis’ continued success in shooting down the MQ-9
Reaper, which was the main means
used by the US military to collect
intelligence on the Houthis. In the
same context, CNN also reported that
intelligence assessments indicated that the
Houthis’ ability and intention to continue launching missiles
at US and commercial ships in the
Red Sea and Israel had not changed much despite the
violent US bombing that continued for six weeks. In
addition, the Houthis’ command and control structure remained
largely intact, according to
them. For this reason, the US campaign
against the Houthis in Yemen ended with the same result as the
previous campaign that took place
during the Biden era, which is the status quo
for the Houthis. On May 5, 2025, less
than two months after the start of the US campaign, the
US Central Command received a
surprise order from the White House to stop the attack. On the
Houthis, then Trump came out and said, “We hit the
Houthis hard, but they have a
great ability to withstand the strikes and showed
great courage. They committed to not attacking
American ships, and we will respect their word.” This is what
Trump said in front of the media, but what happened behind
the scenes was a little different. In short, Trump was
fed up with the length of the campaign on Yemen and its high
cost, which reached nearly 2 billion
dollars in a few weeks without achieving any
noteworthy results on the ground. In this context, the Sultanate of
Oman intervened and played the role of mediator between the
Americans and the Houthis, and the
agreement ended with both parties committing not to target
each other, even though this was not the cause of the quarrel in the first place. The
Americans entered this battle from the beginning
on behalf of the Israelis, who were
constantly threatening to attack ships linked to
them or to strike them in occupied Palestine with
drones and missiles. The important thing is that
the Americans withdrew and left
the Israelis alone to confront the Houthis.
Therefore, they were no longer concerned with responding to the
Houthis if they attacked the Israelis, which
complicated efforts. The Americans were more concerned that they were being
exhausted at a faster rate than the Houthis,
who relied heavily in their attacks
on the Americans on relatively cheap weapons such as
drones. The Americans are trying to repel them with
much more expensive weapons. In May 2024, the then-
Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and
Sustainment, William LaPlante, said in his
testimony before the Senate that if we were to shoot down a
$50,000 unidirectional drone with a $3 million missile, that is not a
good cost equation. In addition to this, there was a
second important challenge that the Americans suffered from more than the
Houthis, which is the ability to replace or compensate for the
US military’s stocks of
interceptor missiles that were being used to
shoot down Houthi missiles and
drones quickly enough. Patriot missiles, for example, are
produced by Lockheed Martin. If this company is able to
produce 600 PAC-3 MSI missiles this year, it
will have achieved an unprecedented accomplishment.
In short, missile production Besides, it's
very expensive and takes a long time. On the other hand, the
Houthis have been relying
on cheap weapons and drones to threaten the Americans and Israelis, and
this is something we must confront.
About 15 years ago, specifically in 2010, the
number of countries that possessed
armed drones exceeded three countries. In 2024,
this number jumped to more than 40 countries. Not only that,
drones are now in the hands of
non-state armed groups in many places around the world,
including here in the Middle East. The
Houthis, despite being relatively new
to drone technology,
were among the first to use
drones in military attacks. The first
recorded Houthi attack using drones
was in September 2016. The Houthis began
learning this technology from their
Iranian allies, who provided them with significant assistance
in this matter through technology transfer,
training, and supplying them with components. The first
attack drone to appear with the Houthis was the
drone they call Qasef-1, according to several
international investigations. This drone is a copy of the
Iranian Ababil-T drone. The Iranians
played a pivotal role in helping the Houthis
develop and expand their arsenal of
drones. The Houthis have made great strides in mastering
drone technology and manufacturing parts for them,
especially since the matter is no longer difficult or impossible
in light of the fact that important technologies such as 3D printing have become
available to everyone. However, the
Houthis still rely on foreign components for
drones, which they cannot manufacture due to their
complexity. These components, which they obtain
through smuggling, are often sourced from either
Iran or China. At the end of July 2024, the
US Treasury Department imposed sanctions on
a number of Chinese companies after accusing them of
helping the Houthis obtain
components and equipment that would enable them to possess
drones, ballistic missiles, and
cruise missiles in August. In the same year, a shipment
was intercepted in the Red Sea, en
route to the Houthis. Chinese cylinders were found
labeled as oxygen cylinders,
while what was inside was hydrogen, which can be
used to operate fuel cells for
drones. Houthi
drones can travel a distance of 750 miles using
traditional methods, such as gas engines or
lithium batteries, while hydrogen fuel cells
enable them to travel three times that distance. On
July 19, 2024, a Houthi drone flew for
approximately 16 hours from Yemen, covering a distance of more than 2,600
km, before reaching Tel Aviv and hitting a building there,
killing an Israeli and wounding others. A
day later, specifically on July 20, 2024, the Israeli Air Force launched its
first attack on Yemen,
targeting a number of infrastructure facilities
located in areas controlled by the Houthis. The nature of the
targets that the Israelis have targeted in
Yemen from that moment until today, the overwhelming
majority of which are targets Civilian and
infrastructure facilities such as ports and power stations
also reflect the same problem that the Americans were suffering from,
which is the lack of
intelligence information and the absence of a strong target bank
similar to the Israeli target bank in
other arenas such as Iran or Lebanon. This situation has its
reasons before Operation Flood of Al-Aqsa in October
2023. The Israelis did not view the
Houthis as a major threat like they did,
for example, Iran, Hezbollah,
or Hamas. Therefore, they did not
try to collect important intelligence information
about them, to the point that they allocated
only one intelligence officer to work on the
Yemeni arena. With the beginning of the Israeli war on
Gaza and the Houthis’ entry into the line under the slogan of
victory and support for Gaza, the Israelis began to
realize for the first time the danger of their distant opponent.
However, at this stage, the Americans, led by
Biden, asked the Israelis not to
respond to the Houthis and promised them that they would undertake to
defend them against the Houthis, and this is what
actually happened throughout the era of Biden and at the beginning of the
Trump era, until the latter withdrew and left the mission to
the Israelis last May, and within the framework of
their efforts to improve their intelligence capabilities in
Yemen, which is considered a strange and new arena
for them, the Israeli Air Force Intelligence Unit
established a new division in early 2025
called the Yemen Arena, in which four officers were
assigned four tasks regarding Yemen:
intelligence, defense, warning, and attack.
Months later, specifically last July, the
Israelis, after they emerged from the 12-
day war with Iran, directed part of their
intelligence resources that were working on Iran
towards Yemen, according to the First Street Journal.
Israeli military intelligence established a
new unit dedicated to Yemen, which includes 200
intelligence officers and soldiers. This unit is most likely the one
that monitored the meeting of members of the Houthi government
on August 28 of last year. According to the First Street
Journal, two Israeli intelligence officers
received signals the day
before the meeting indicating that ministers in the
Houthi government intended to meet in Sanaa,
hours after receiving this signal,
Israeli aircraft moved quickly on their way to Yemen
to bomb the conference hall
where a large number of members of the Houthi government were gathered,
headed by Prime Minister Ahmed Ghaleb Al-Rahwi,
who died in the attack along with a number of his ministers.
According to analysts, this attack, despite its strength, was
largely symbolic and caused a major difference in the
battle between the Israelis and the Houthis, given
that the hard core of the group, the
Houthi leaders themselves, including their
military leaders, were far from being targeted.
Therefore, the situation remains as it is, with
mutual strikes between the two parties currently continuing
without an end in sight, given the Houthis’ insistence
on not swaying the balance, unless the war
in Gaza stops and the Houthis stop targeting the
Israelis, as happened in the last truce
that was violated by the Israeli occupation.
By the way, even if the war in Gaza stops and
the Houthis stop attacking the Israelis, the
Israelis will not stop gathering
intelligence information on the Houthis.
On the contrary, they will focus on them. More than
ever, they are trying to build a strong target bank in
Yemen. This mission is very difficult for the
Israelis at the present time, and its completion
may take many years. This is for more than one
reason. First, the Houthis are a completely new adversary for the
Israelis. They know almost nothing about them.
According to statements made by Israeli officials to the
Jerusalem Post, the Israelis
are starting their intelligence efforts in Yemen from
scratch. There is no foundation to build upon. This is in contrast to the situation
on other fronts, which the Israelis
know by heart. The second reason is related to
the Houthis themselves. According to what the First Street
Journal reported, citing informed sources, the Houthis are very
careful. They communicate with each other face-to-face, not
by phone. They do not use
social media, and they change their locations frequently and
continuously, sometimes every night. In addition, the war
with Israel is not the first war the Houthis have waged. They have
waged military confrontations for years before, which contributed
to developing their skills in disappearing and avoiding
targeting. This brings us to the next reason that
complicates Israeli intelligence efforts
in Yemen against the Houthis: geography.
First of all, Yemen is very far from Israel. They are separated
from each other, as we said, by approximately 2,000 kilometers, and this makes
Israeli penetration difficult.
For example, the presence of borders between Israel and Lebanon makes it easier for the
Israelis to gather
intelligence information about Hezbollah. You will tell me that
Iran is still far from the Israelis, and despite
that, they have collected amazing intelligence information about it. I
will tell you that is true. But Iran has a dagger in
its hand called Azrabijah, which allows the
Israelis to use its territory to operate against its
Iranian neighbors. This is in addition to, of course, the
Iranians’ recklessness in dealing with devices connected to the
Internet or telephone networks. In
addition to the geographical distance and the lack of
common borders, there is also the topographical dimension related
to the nature of the Yemeni land itself. In northern Yemen, where the
Houthis are stationed, the
rugged mountainous terrain provides the Houthis with natural cover and
hinders aerial reconnaissance and electronic surveillance operations.
In a semi-arid environment, the
Houthi leaders do not reside in exposed buildings or
central command centers, but rather use caves
and safe houses as impeded shelters between which they move
constantly, not collectively. The fourth challenge
facing Israeli
intelligence efforts in Yemen is the nature of
Yemeni society itself, which is essentially a tribal society that is
difficult for outsiders to penetrate or penetrate
in light of the existence of a border union. The
Israelis’ ability to eliminate or
neutralize the Houthis will remain a matter of great doubt, especially since
their capabilities, whether firepower or intelligence.
Certainly not greater or better than the capabilities of the
Americans, who fought for months of bloody battles
with the Houthis, which did not change much on the ground. The
war between the two sides now is best described as a
war of attrition in which both sides are losing.
Although the Israeli strikes are more severe, the
Houthis appear, up to now, according to the
Israelis’ own estimates, to be the most stubborn
and most capable party to withstand,
especially since the American withdrawal in front of them
last May gave them great confidence in themselves and
strengthened their position in front of the Israelis, considering them
undeterred and the most insane party in the
resistance axis linked to Iran. What makes the
Houthis a greater challenge for the Israelis
is their different style in managing the conflict. In a
study published in April 2024 under the title “
Assassin’s Houthis and Afar,” Dr. Michael Knights, a
specialist in military affairs, says that the
most interesting observation regarding the
Houthis is that they were the
only non-Palestinian party in the resistance axis that
committed to entering into an open war with Israel
from the first moment without… He is afraid of any
Israeli reaction. The man is saying literally that the Houthis launched their
best strikes on Israel from the beginning,
refusing to abide by any rules. According to
Knights, this was a different approach for the rest of the axis’s parties,
with the exception of the resistance in Gaza. In this context, he
gave the example of Iran, which did not attack Israel
directly until April 13, 2024, after its
consulate in Damascus was bombed, meaning 189 days after the
outbreak of the Al-Aqsa Intifada. He also cited Hezbollah in Lebanon,
which, according to Knights, tried to protect itself
from violent Israeli reactions
by adhering as much as possible to the rules of the
game. Here, it is necessary to take into account that
Knights wrote this in April 2024, meaning before
the Israelis surprised everyone by destroying the rules of the
game and assassinating Hezbollah’s Chief of Staff, Fouad
Shukr, at the end of July, and then the party’s commander-in-chief,
Hassan Nasrallah, at the end of September of the same
year. In short, the current situation is that the
Houthis continue to clash with the
Israelis in a battle without rules,
in which each party strikes whoever it can without worrying about any consequences, and both parties
On August 27, 2025, the
Israeli newspaper, The Jerusalem Post, reported that
senior Israeli officials said in
statements made in the early stages of the war, and that the
Americans agreed with them, that the
Shiite Houthis, as they put it, are the craziest
Iranian agents in the region, and that engaging
in a retaliatory confrontation with them in which an
eye is struck for an eye or a weight for a weight will end
badly for the Jewish state because they are
practically undeterred. The day after
this article was published, specifically on August 28,
Israel launched an attack on the headquarters of a meeting of
members of the Houthi government in Yemen, which claimed the lives of
a number of ministers and officials, headed by the
Prime Minister of the Houthi government himself,
given their behavior over the past two years, during
which they were exposed to strikes that caused
very severe economic losses for Yemen. The
very poor Houthis show no signs of
retreating from the Israelis
and continue to put them under pressure, whether through
drones or missiles, most of which can be
intercepted, but despite this, they annoy the
Israelis because they feel that they are under
fire all the time, especially when they are forced to flee to
shelters with every missile that is launched. In
this context, Dan Strinovich, the former head of the
Iranian branch in Israeli military intelligence,
said in statements to Da’ot
Ahronot that the economic losses that the
Houthis are suffering from our bombing of the
infrastructure and economy in Yemen are enormous,
but for them it is an acceptable price in exchange for bombing
Israel, and that if we bombed the port of Hodeidah 100
more times, it would be of no use because, according to him, the
strength of the Houthis
lies in their weakness and the fact that they do not have a specific center of gravity.
If Israel targeted it, it would succeed in stopping its attack.
In the same context, Odeb Eilam, the former senior official
in the competition, told the Ill Street Journal
that Israel alone cannot launch a
long-term campaign against The Houthis need the Americans to
intervene with us again and return to the battlefield.
This point brings me to the question of the episode: Do you think
Trump might return to engage with the
Israelis again in the fight against the Houthis,
or will he leave the Israelis alone? I will follow your
answers in the comments at the end.
If you liked the episode and would like to see us again, please
subscribe to the channel and wait for us in
new episodes, God willing. Bye [Music]
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