Is the Houthi Missile Strike on an Israeli Airport a Sign of Success?

By Noah Rothman

Monday, May 05, 2025

 

Among progressives who mistake ghoulish morbidity for cleverness, it was once uncontroversial to insist that there was something unfair about the extent to which Israelis were not being killed by Palestinian missile barrages in satisfying numbers.

 

“Unlike Israel, missile defense programs, such as Iron Dome, don’t exist to protect Palestinian civilians,” Representative Ilhan Omar once mourned. “Many will tell you Israel has a right to defend itself, to safety and security, but are silent on whether Palestinians have those rights, too.” The childlike idea expressed here and elsewhere on the fringes of socially acceptable leftwing thought is that, in the absence of an equivalent body count, Israel’s incomprehensible aggression will continue. After all, Newsweek’s Muhammad Shehada admitted, “to the child whose home is destroyed and whose father and brothers are killed by an Israeli bomb, it doesn’t really matter who shot the first rocket.”

 

It does, in fact, matter which party fires the opening salvos in a war. Regardless, pro-Palestinian activists should be enjoying the perverse satisfaction they appear to derive from the indications that Israel’s missile-defense arrays are not infallible.

 

In October of last year, although most of the drones and rockets fired on Israel from Iranian territory were intercepted before they reached their targets, an Iranian ballistic and cruise missile salvo managed to penetrate Israeli air defenses. Dozens of targets near the Nevatim and Tel Nof Airbases were hit as Iranian warheads evaded Israel’s THAAD, Arrow, and David’s Sling advanced interceptors. A few months earlier, a sophisticated Houthi drone flew under the radar and made it to Tel Aviv, where it impacted an apartment building just feet from a U.S. diplomatic facility. Yesterday, flights out of Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport were halted when a Houthi missile’s payload exploded upon impact with a highway leading into Israel’s busiest transit hub.

 

“The incident marks a major security breach at one of the most heavily protected sites in the country,” CNN reported, “and is likely to raise questions about Israel’s ability to intercept such attacks despite its vaunted missile defense system.” The incident and those that preceded it raise more conclusions than questions. Foremost among them should be the determination that missile shields are just one aspect of a comprehensive defensive posture, but those batteries alone do not provide peace. It should be obvious by now that the sort of protection civilians in responsive democracies demand from the state can only be achieved by neutralizing those missiles at their source.

 

That’s why, despite its setbacks and unsatisfying results (which Jim itemized in all their disturbing detail), the Iran-backed Houthis’ attacks on Israel may be a sign that the Trump administration’s campaign against the terrorist outfit is bearing fruit.

 

In the estimation of Y Net’s Ron Ben-Yishai, the increasing tempo of Houthi attacks on Israel is a sign that the outfit is losing confidence in its ability to withstand the U.S.-led assault on its fighters and missile sites. His reporting indicates that “the U.S. has significantly improved its intelligence capabilities over the past six weeks of airstrikes in Yemen,” taking the terrorists by “surprise” and hitting launch sites and weapons depots without warning. In addition, “The U.S. has been effective in disrupting the smuggling of Iranian drones and missiles into Yemen, leading to a sharp decline in the Houthis’ stockpiles.” Thus, the Houthis have been forced into “rushing to launch missiles and drones before they can be destroyed.”

 

That’s heartening news. Western audiences that only hear about America’s failures in the Middle East may know only that the U.S.-led mission in the Red Sea has cost America at least seven multi-million-dollar MQ-9 Reaper Drones and one F/A-18 Super Hornet. If Ben-Yishai’s analysis is correct, however, the campaign in Yemen is achieving its primary aim: degrading the Houthis’s capacity to target our allies and attack U.S. Navy and merchant marine vessels.

 

And yet, that objective will never be decisively secured from the air. As Israel’s experience attests, interceptor technology alone is insufficient to preserve that country’s security, or anyone else’s. Aggression is stopped at its source. Thus, nearly 19 months into the longest war in Israel’s history and with the prospects for durable cease-fires and meaningful hostage swaps all but exhausted, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is reluctantly committing itself to expanding operations inside Gaza with an eye toward the long-term “holding of territories” inside parts of the Strip. In the absence of a dramatic intervention like that, it seems impossible now to avoid the conclusion that Hamas rocket attacks on Israeli population centers and military targets alike will persist.

 

Missile defenses are an invaluable component of a “multilayered” air defense posture. But as an instrument of deterrence, interceptor batteries are inadequate. “When necessary, intercepting ballistic missiles and other projectiles still saves lives and buys time for decision makers to prepare their response,” The Atlantic Council’s Jean-Loup Samaan averred. But those technological marvels don’t create the conditions for peace on their own. “From now on,” he added, “regional military planners are likely to favor offense, not defense.”