Tag: yemen

Houthi Hypersonic Missile Renders Iron Dome Useless, Slams Into Tel Aviv Area

Yemen’s Houthi rebels launched its second hypersonic missile attack on Israel in just days, striking the Tel Aviv area early Saturday morning. The attack marked a rare instance where a hypersonic weapon overwhelmed Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system, underscoring the challenges posed by these new ultra-fast missiles. 

“Between the Yemeni Armed Forces regarding the implementation of a military operation targeting a military target of the Israeli enemy in the occupied Jaffa area with a hypersonic ballistic missile Palestine 2,” Houthi military spokesman Yahya Saree announced on X. 

Footage post on X shows the failed interception of the hypersonic missile by the Iron Dome system. 

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Pentagon ‘Shocked’ By Houthi Arsenal, Sophistication Is ‘Getting Scary’

A top Pentagon official responsible for purchasing arms for America’s defense stockpile has expressed ‘shock’ at the increasingly sophisticated arsenal possessed by Yemen’s Houthis.

Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment Bill LaPlante spoke at an event hosted by Axios on Wednesday, where he said that Houthis are displaying and deploying advanced weaponry, especially missiles that “can do things that are just amazing.”

He described that Houthis “are getting scary” in terms of their capability on display for more than a year in the Red Sea, where they’ve gone to war against Israeli and international shipping.

“I’m an engineer and a physicist, and I’ve been around missiles my whole career,” LaPlante said before the summit, called the “Future of Defense” in Washington, DC.

“What I’ve seen of what the Houthis have done in the last six months is something that — I’m just shocked.”

Among the surprisingly advanced capabilities include anti-ship ballistic missiles. Analysts have widely asserted that without doubt Iran is directly supplying these and other capabilities.

The Houthis have also routinely scored direct hits on commercial shipping vessels with both aerial and drone boats.

The Shia group has also claimed many times to have scored hits on US, UK, and other allied warships; however, the US has kept a tight lid on the extent of this, or actual damage, perhaps wishing to not give the Houthis a propaganda win.

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US air strikes target Houthis in several cities in Yemen

The United States military has struck a number of cities in Yemen, including the capital, Sanaa, and the key port city of Hodeidah.

Forces from the US Central Command (CENTCOM), the military command responsible for US forces in the Middle East, “conducted strikes on 15 Houthi targets in Iranian-backed Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen today”, it said on X on Friday.

Four strikes targeted Sanaa and seven hit Hodeidah, according to the Houthi-run Al Masirah TV network. Correspondents with the AFP news agency also reported hearing loud explosions in both cities.

The Hodeidah strikes hit the airport and the Katheib area, which has a Houthi-controlled military base, Al Masirah said. Footage on social media verified by Al Jazeera’s fact-checking agency showed large plumes of smoke resulting from the strikes in Hodeidah.

At least one strike hit Dhamar province, and air raids took place in Bayda province, southeast of Sanaa, the Houthi media office also said.

“These actions were taken to protect freedom of navigation and make international waters safer and more secure for US, coalition, and merchant vessels,” CENTCOM said in its post on X, adding that the strikes took place at around 1400GMT.

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It’s Time to End Biden’s Yemen War

Hal Brands is annoyed that the U.S. isn’t making its illegal, pointless war in Yemen even more destructive:

The core issue is that Washington has hesitated to take stronger measures — such as sinking the Iranian intelligence ship that supports the Houthis, or targeting the infrastructure that sustains their rule within Yemen — for fear of inflaming a tense regional situation.

That approach has limited the near-term risk of escalation, but allowed Tehran and the Houthis to keep the showdown simmering at their preferred temperature. It also reflects the underlying fatigue of a US military that lacks enough cruise missiles, laser-guided bombs, strike aircraft and warships to prosecute the campaign more aggressively without compromising its readiness for conflicts elsewhere.

The real problem with this war is that the U.S. and its allies have been trying to compel the Houthis through a bombing campaign that could not realistically succeed. The U.S. chose to escalate the conflict in January without having any idea of how it would achieve its stated goals. Now it is stuck with an ongoing conflict that it isn’t winning but that it refuses to end out of pride and stubbornness. Further escalation would destabilize the region more and expose more U.S. forces to attack, but it would not solve the main problem that the war has never been worth fighting.

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Yemen: Hodeidah port attack by Israel was a ‘potential war crime’

Last month’s Israeli air strikes on Yemen’s port city of Hodeidah could constitute a war crime, Human Rights Watch said on Monday.

The rights group described the attacks as potentially “unlawful, indiscriminate or disproportionate”, and said they were likely to impact civilians in the country.

Israel carried out air strikes on the Yemeni city after a drone launched by the country’s Houthi movement, also known as Ansar Allah, hit central Tel Aviv, killing one person.

The Houthis, who control Sanaa and most of northern and western Yemen, have been launching drone attacks towards Israel in response to its ongoing military campaign against Palestinians in Gaza.

“Serious violations of the laws of war committed wilfully, that is deliberately or recklessly, are war crimes,” HRW said.

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Biden Brags That ‘the United States Is Not at War’ As He Bombs Yemen

President Joe Biden called himself “the first president this century to report to the American people that the United States is not at war anywhere in the world” in a speech on Wednesday night. Less than an hour before Biden spoke those words, the U.S. military had announced that it was bombing Yemen again.

“In the past 24 hours, U.S. Central Command (USCENTCOM) forces successfully destroyed two Iranian-backed Houthi missiles on launchers in a Houthi-controlled area of Yemen,” the U.S. military command responsible for the Middle East and Central Asia declared shortly before Biden’s speech began. “It was determined these weapons presented an imminent threat to U.S., coalition forces, and merchant vessels in the region.”

After completing the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, Biden took credit for ending “the longest war in American history,” what he called a “forever war.” Yet the Biden administration has extended other U.S. forever wars—and introduced U.S. forces into new ones.

When Biden first ordered airstrikes on Yemen’s Houthi movement in January, it was the first direct U.S. attack on the Houthis ever, and the first airstrike on Yemen by any force in two years. The U.S. had previously brokered a truce between the Houthi government in Sanaa and the rival Saudi-backed government in Aden.

But as war broke out in Gaza last year, the Houthis announced that they would attack Israeli-linked shipping in solidarity with the Palestinian cause. Foreign ships began avoiding the Red Sea off the coast of Yemen, a key international waterway, and Biden tried to reopen it by bombing the Houthis.

Asked by reporters whether the airstrikes were working, Biden gave a formula for endless war. “Well, when you say ‘working,’ are they stopping the Houthis? No. Are they going to continue? Yes,” he said.

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US Launches Heavy Strikes in Yemen

The US has launched several rounds of strikes on Yemen over the past few days as its war against the Houthis in the Red Sea continues.

US Central Command reported fresh strikes on Houthi-controlled Yemen, which is where most of the country’s population lives, on July 11, July 12, and July 14. Yemeni media reported the attacks each day and described them as joint US-British strikes, although it’s unclear if the UK was involved.

In the latest attack on Sunday, Yemen’s SABA news agency reported three strikes in the Red Sea province of Hodeidah. “A security source told SABA that the US-British aggression aircraft targeted Hodeidah International Airport with two raids, and launched a raid on the Bheisi area of Alluheyah district,” the news agency said.

There’s no indication if there were casualties in the three days of US strikes on Yemen. CENTCOM typically claims that its strikes destroy Houthi drones or some other type of military equipment that it deems a threat. According to the Yemen Data Project, joint US-British airstrikes killed 16 Yemeni civilians on May 30.

CENTCOM has also reported that US naval forces have been downing and intercepting Houthi missiles and drones. The US has already spent over $1 billion on munitions in its new war with the Houthis in what US commanders are calling the largest US naval battle since World War II.

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We Spent a Billion Dollars Fighting the Houthis… and Lost

Why does it seem the Pentagon is far better at spending money than actually putting together a successful operation? The failed “Operation Prosperity Guardian” and the disastrous floating Gaza pier are but two recent examples of enormously expensive initiatives that, though they no-doubt enriched military contractors, were incapable of meeting their stated goals.

To great fanfare, last December the Pentagon announced the launch of Operation Prosperity Guardian, a joint US/UK military operation to halt the Yemeni Houthi disruption of Israel-linked commercial shipping through the Red Sea. The Houthis announced their policy in response to civilian deaths in Israel’s war on Gaza, but when the US and UK military became involved they announced they would target US and UK shipping as well.

The operation was supposed to be quick and easy. After all, the rag-tag Houthi militia was no match for the mighty US and UK navies. But it didn’t work out that way at all. Over the weekend the Wall Street Journal published a devastating article revealing that after spending more than one billion dollars on munitions alone, the operation had failed to deter the Houthis and failed to re-open commercial shipping in the Red Sea.

The Journal reported that Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, recently told Congress that “the U.S.-led effort has been insufficient to deter the militant group’s targeting of ships and that the threat will ‘remain active for some time.’”

Meanwhile, the article informed us that a continued US effort to fight the Houthis over Red Sea shipping was “not sustainable.” Perhaps the most revealing part of the article comes from a Washington military expert, Emily Harding of CSIS: “Their supply of weapons from Iran is cheap and highly sustainable, but ours is expensive, our supply chains are crunched, and our logistics tails are long.”

It is reminiscent of a recollection by Col. Harry G. Summers of a discussion he had with North Vietnamese Col. Tu: “You know, you never defeated us on the battlefield,” said Summers. Tu paused for a moment, then replied, “That may be so. But it is also irrelevant.”

Similarly, the US military spent a quarter of a billion dollars building a temporary floating pier to deliver aid to the starving Palestinians even though a land route already existed and would have been far cheaper to use. The project was doomed from the beginning, as days after opening stormy weather broke up the pier and washed part of it up on Israel’s shore. The US military managed to gather the pieces together again, but in total only a few aid trucks managed to use it before, over the weekend, the pier was again disassembled for fear of another weather-related break-up.

The only thing the pier was good for, it seems, was assisting the Israeli military in a Gaza raid on June 8th that killed 270 Palestinian civilians.

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Houthis claim missile attack on USS Dwight D. Eisenhower in Red Sea; DoD says attack never happened

There is conflicting information out there about what happened or did not happen in the Red Sea pertaining to the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, also known as “Ike.”

The Houthis in Yemen say they successfully conducted a missile attack on the nuclear-powered carrier while the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) says no such attack happened.

After the Houthis claimed credit for the attack, an unnamed DoD official reportedly told Politico‘s Lara Seligman that this is “false information,” adding that “there was no hit on the Ike or any attacks in its vicinity.”

The Houthis, meanwhile, say that the attack with both cruise and ballistic missiles did, in fact, happen in response to the American-British bombardment of Sanaa and Hodeidah, calling the hit “accurate and direct.”

Both Reuters and Al Jazeera reported that the attack happened, citing Houthi military spokesman Yahya Saree who issued a televised statement about the alleged attack.

An English translation of a tweet from Saree’s X account explains how the alleged attack was a response to “American-British aggression in support of the Zionist enemy, which caused 58 martyrs and wounded, to dissuade our dear people and the Armed Forces from their position of support for the oppressed Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip.”

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Yemen dismantles extensive US, Israeli spy network

Yemeni security services have uncovered an extensive spy network operated by US and Israeli intelligence agencies and active within various institutions in Yemen since 2015, Al Mayadeen reported on 10 June.

The head of Yemen’s intelligence agency, the Security and Intelligence Service, Major General Abdul Hakim Hashem al-Khaiwani, said in a televised statement, “The exposed network collected important information in various fields and carried out direct espionage technical operations on behalf of the enemy’s intelligence services to obtain confidential, sovereign information.”

The agency added that the network gathered critical information across multiple sectors and relayed it to hostile intelligence services.

The information was used to influence decision-makers, infiltrate state agencies, sabotage Yemen’s economy and agricultural sector, and recruit officials within the Yemeni government.

Additionally, the espionage network provided military intelligence to US and Israeli intelligence agencies to weaken the Yemeni army and diminish its capabilities.

According to SABA News Agency, a security official said that the members caught over the past few days were recruited to work on collecting information and monitoring sites belonging to the Yemeni Armed Forces on the western coast of the Republic of Yemen.

The Al Mayadeen correspondent added that dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of members in various ministries, institutions, and organizations are part of the vast intelligence network seized by the Yemeni security services.

Yemeni forces are currently engaged in a conflict with the US, UK, and Israel. Yemeni forces began attacking Israeli-linked commercial ships in November in response to Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. The US and UK responded by attacking Yemeni naval and land targets.

Earlier this month, Yemeni security forces detained more than a dozen aid workers, including UN staff, in an apparently coordinated sweep, according to a diplomatic source and a Yemeni NGO.

At least 18 Yemeni aid workers were detained, the Yemeni Mayyun Organization for Human Rights said, listing ten workers from UN agencies.

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