Houthi movement

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The Houthi movement, formally Ansar Allah (“Partisans of God”), is an Iranian-armed Zaydi Shia militia that seized Yemen’s capital by force in 2014, has ruled northern Yemen as a one-party police state ever since, and flies an official banner reading “God is Great, Death to America, Death to Israel, a curse upon the Jews, victory to Islam.” It is designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the United States, has fired hundreds of missiles and drones at Israel and at commercial shipping in the Red Sea since October 2023, and has presided over the near-total destruction of a Jewish community that predates Islam by centuries. It also administers courts, schools and hospitals in the territory it controls, which is the fact an encyclopedia entry can report honestly without softening what the movement is.

Who they are and where they came from

The Houthis take their name from the Houthi clan of Saada province in Yemen’s northern highlands, home to the Zaydis, a distinct branch of Shia Islam that makes up roughly a third of Yemen’s population and had ruled the region for a thousand years under an imamate abolished in 1962. In the 1990s a Zaydi revivalist, Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi, built a youth movement to counter the spread of Saudi-funded Salafism into the north. Opposition to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq radicalized the group, and in 2004 the Yemeni government under Ali Abdullah Saleh killed Hussein al-Houthi, launching an insurgency his brother Abdul-Malik al-Houthi still leads today. Six rounds of fighting between 2004 and 2010, known as the Saada wars, failed to crush the movement.

What they did: from insurgency to Sanaa

Yemen’s 2011 uprising toppled Saleh, and the Houthis exploited the chaos, allying briefly with their old enemy Saleh’s loyalist army units. In September 2014 they captured Sanaa, and by January 2015 they had ousted the internationally recognized government of President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi. A Saudi-led coalition intervened in March 2015 to restore Hadi, opening a civil war that has produced one of the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophes: the United Nations estimated 377,000 deaths in Yemen between 2015 and early 2022, roughly 60 percent of them from indirect causes such as malnutrition and collapsed healthcare rather than combat itself. The Houthis have controlled Sanaa and most of northern Yemen, home to the bulk of the country’s population, for over a decade, ruling through a parallel security and court system that jails dissidents, conscripts child soldiers, and taxes the population under threat of force.

Iran’s role: the newest link in the Axis of Resistance

Iran did not create the Houthi movement the way it built Hezbollah, but it has become the Houthis’ decisive patron. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps supplies weapons transfers, training and intelligence, smuggling in the drone components, missile warheads and radar systems that let a rebel movement in Yemen strike ships in the Red Sea and cities in Israel, over 1,000 miles from its own territory. A single shipment intercepted in July 2025 carried 750 tons of conventional weapons. In exchange the Houthis protect Iranian shipping, threaten Saudi Arabia, and give Tehran deniability, functioning as the newest node in Iran’s Axis of Resistance alongside Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iraqi militias, despite practicing a different branch of Shia Islam than Iran’s own clergy.

The Red Sea campaign and direct attacks on Israel

On 31 October 2023, three weeks after the Hamas-led October 7 attacks, the Houthis declared they were entering the war “in solidarity” with Gaza, though no Israeli or American action had touched Yemen. On 19 November 2023 they hijacked the cargo ship Galaxy Leader and its crew; by late January 2024 they had struck at least 33 more vessels with drones, missiles and speedboats, sinking ships and killing sailors who had no connection to the conflict, in what amounted to a blockade of one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes. The White House’s January 2025 designation order tallied more than 100 attacks on commercial vessels transiting the Bab al-Mandeb Strait and dozens of strikes on US Navy warships. Against Israel itself, the Houthis have fired missiles and drones toward Eilat and Tel Aviv since October 2023; on 19 July 2024 a drone evaded interception and struck an apartment building near Tel Aviv’s US embassy branch, killing one person and wounding ten, prompting an Israeli strike on Hodeidah’s port and power station the next day.

What complicates the picture, and why it doesn’t change what they are

The Houthis market the Red Sea campaign and the missiles at Israel as solidarity with Palestinians, a framing several Western outlets have repeated uncritically even though the group had no prior involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and used the war as cover to expand its own regional reach.

Three complications are real and belong in a full account: the Houthis do provide functioning, if authoritarian, governance across a large population Yemen’s internationally recognized government cannot reach; Iran’s control over Houthi decision-making is looser than its control over Hezbollah, and Houthi leaders have at times acted against Tehran’s stated preferences; and the Saudi-led coalition’s own air campaign has killed thousands of Yemeni civilians. None of it changes what the Houthis themselves are: an Iranian-armed militia that seized power by force, markets a war of opportunity as solidarity, and flies a banner cursing Jews by name.

The persecution of Yemen’s Jews

Yemen’s Jewish community is one of the oldest in the world, predating Islam by centuries and numbering roughly 55,000 in 1948, before a wave of persecution, including a 1947 pogrom in Aden that killed 82 people, drove nearly the entire community to Israel in the covert 1949-50 airlift known as Operation Magic Carpet. The few thousand who stayed have been hunted down under Houthi rule. In March 2016 the Houthis arrested Levi Salem Musa Marhabi on the charge of helping smuggle an 800-year-old Torah scroll out of the country; he was sentenced in 2018, an appeals court found him innocent and ordered his release in 2019, and the Houthis have kept him in solitary confinement regardless, torturing him to the point of losing his teeth and suffering a stroke, according to reporting on his case. The last handful of Yemeni Jews still in Houthi territory were expelled or fled in the years that followed; when Yahya ben Yosef, one of the community’s final members, died in June 2024, Muslim neighbors had to bury him because no Jews remained to do it. A community that once numbered in the tens of thousands has been reduced, under an organization whose own banner curses Jews by name, to essentially none.

Hezbollah · Axis of Resistance · Iran’s Regional Armed Network · glossary: Houthis · Who attacked first, every war

Sources

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