(Dave DeCamp, Antiwar.com) The leader of Yemen’s Houthis, officially known as Ansar Allah, vowed on Sunday that the campaign against Israel that was launched in support of the Palestinians in Gaza would continue despite the Israeli assassination of the prime minister of the Houthi-led Yemeni government.
“Yemen’s position towards the Palestinian people is firm and cannot be reversed. Our people say to the Palestinian people: We are with you and we support you,” Abdul Malik al-Houthi said in a speech where he offered condolences for the family of Prime Minister Ahmed al-Rahawi and other government ministers who were killed by August 28 Israeli airstrikes on the Yemeni capital of Sanaa.
“The military path in targeting the Israeli enemy, whether with missiles, drones, or a naval blockade, is continuous and unwavering,” al-Houthi added, according to Al Mayadeen.
Al-Rahawi was a civilian official who was not considered part of al-Houthi’s inner circle. He was tasked with running the day-to-day affairs in Sanaa and other areas of Houthi-controlled Yemen, which is where about 70% to 80% of Yemenis live, according to numbers from the US State Department. The Houthis have been the governing authority in the area since 2014, when they first took power in Sanaa after ousting a US and Saudi-backed government, which a US-backed Saudi-UAE-led coalition attempted and failed to reinstall in a brutal war from 2015 to 2022.
Mohammad al-Bukhaiti, a senior Ansar Allah official, suggested that the Houthis could escalate their attacks on Israel in response to the killing of al-Rahawi. “Targeting the government meeting is a crossing of red lines,” he said on Saturday. “The war has entered a new phase, and revenge must be taken; our actions will precede our words.”
The Houthis are known for their resilience and did not back down in the face of a very heavy US bombing campaign that the Trump administration conducted from March 15 to May 6, which killed more than 250 civilians. The US gave up on trying to get the Houthis to stop their attacks on Israel and their blockade of Israeli shipping and agreed to a ceasefire with the group.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu threatened to kill more senior Yemeni officials at a cabinet meeting on Sunday. “We are doing what no one else has done before us, and this is only the beginning of the strikes against the senior leadership in Sanaa,” he said, according to The New York Times. “We will get to them all.”
The only thing that has gotten the Houthis to stop their attacks was the brief ceasefire in Gaza that started in January 2025 and ended when Israel restarted its genocidal war in March.
This article originally appeared at Antiwar.com.
