“A stroke of luck” is how Mahdi Al Mashat, a political representative of Yemen’s Houthi rebels, described Thursday’s Israeli strike on Sanaa that killed the Iran-backed administration’s prime minister and other top officials.
Although the group swiftly promised revenge, reiterated its support for the Palestinian people and said public services would not be affected, the reality is that the militants had been riding their luck for some time. In Israel, they face an opponent whose long policy of extrajudicial killings has evolved from the assassination of individual enemies, such as PLO operatives or Iranian nuclear scientists, to the killing of entire leaderships.
Israel’s September 27, 2024 strike on a residential area of southern Beirut resulted not just in the death of Hezbollah secretary general Hassan Nasrallah but that of other senior commanders as well as Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps figures. Less than a fortnight before that, an Israeli attack on Hezbollah’s communications network left eight people dead and thousands wounded as pagers exploded across Lebanon. Not long after Nasrallah’s death, the man tipped by many to be his successor, Hashem Safieddine, was killed in another Israeli strike on Beirut.
Israel’s leadership has proved itself more than willing to strike with impunity anywhere in the region. In April last year, two IRGC generals and five other officers were among those killed in an air strike on the Iranian embassy compound in Damascus – a particularly escalatory attack by a country that has repeatedly bombed neighbouring countries and currently has troops in parts of Syria and Lebanon in addition to its decades-long occupation of Palestine.
Rhetorically too, leading Israeli officials have felt emboldened enough to openly threaten rival regional rivals. Earlier this month, Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz renewed threats against Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who he threatened to assassinate during the 12-day war between the two foes in June. This is the kind of enemy that the Houthis have made and it should not surprise the rebels that their leading figures are a target.
However, what effect Israel’s latest strike will have on impoverished Yemen is not yet clear. The Houthis – whose willingness to spread instability across the region is matched only by their authoritarian and violent rule at home – are an entrenched and potent force. It is clear that the country desperately needs peace but the Houthis remain wedded to an outdated ideology that offers nothing to its people and even less to the Palestinians the rebels purport to be helping.
As for Israel, its leaders should ask themselves if the repeated assassination of entire enemy leaderships truly makes their country any safer. Peace, recognition and regional integration cannot be built on a policy of unending killing that can throw up new figures – possibly even more militant than those who came before them – and shuts down pragmatic channels of compromise.
It is perfectly possible for Israel to guarantee its security but this requires a new approach: building peace with Palestinians. Halting the indiscriminate killing of civilians in Gaza would be a welcome first step in this new direction that could – if pursued diligently and in good faith – lead to two independent states living side by side thereby breaking a cycle of violence that has gone on for far too long.
It is Israel’s continuing failure to end the Palestinian occupation that locks the country and its people into a loop of strike and counterstrike that all but guarantees no permanent peace or lasting security.
