Yemen’s Houthis Have Entered the Iran War. What You Need To Know

Yemen’s Houthi movement announced its entry into the Iran war by firing a barrage of ballistic missiles at southern Israel on Saturday, opening a new front in a regional conflict that President Donald Trump has said is close to ending. 

Brigadier-General Yahya Saree, a military spokesman for the Iran-allied group, said in a message broadcast on a Houthi satellite network that the attack had targeted “sensitive Israeli military sites” in the south of the country. 

He added that the attacks would continue “until the aggression against all fronts of the resistance ceases,” referring to Iran and its ally Hezbollah.  

Read more: What Would a U.S. Win in Iran Look Like? We Asked Over Two Dozen Members of Congress

The Israeli military said it identified the launch of a missile from Yemen and “intercepted the threat.”

The Houthis have repeatedly warned that they would enter the war on the side of Iran, which has supplied them with ballistic missile technology for years.   

The long-threatened entry of the group into the fray adds a new front to the regional conflict that began on Feb. 28 with a joint United States-Israeli attack on Iran that killed the country’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. 

In the month since, Iran’s counterattacks have struck U.S. bases across the Gulf, strategic Gulf infrastructure, and drastically slowed shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. 

Those attacks have had a dramatic impact on global oil and energy prices, and sent gas prices in the U.S. skyrocketing.  

Another Strait   

The Houthis played a similarly outsized role in upending global shipping between November 2023 and January 2025 when they attacked over 100 merchant vessels in the Red Sea in a campaign of solidarity with Palestinians during the Gaza war. 

The group regularly launched missiles towards Israel during the same period—although most were intercepted. Israel responded with heavy airstrikes against Houthi targets in Sanaa and across the group’s territory.

Thomas Juneau, a professor at the University of Ottawa’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs and an associate fellow with Chatham House, tells TIME that if Houthi strikes remain limited to a small number of direct attacks on Israel, “they will not have a major impact on the evolution of the war.” 

“As we saw in past rounds of strikes, Israeli anti-missile defenses are able to intercept most Houthi missiles and drones; those that succeed in evading Israeli defenses have caused limited damage,” he says. 

But if the group decides to attack shipping on the Red Sea again, that would change things. 

“The Houthis would cause a much more important impact on the war if they were to start targeting maritime shipping in the Red Sea and try to close the Bab al-Mandab Strait. This would amplify the war's already strong impact on oil and natural gas prices and on the global economy,” he says.

Attacks on the Red Sea and the Bab al-Mandab Strait would likely disrupt traffic through the Suez Canal, through which around 15% of global maritime trade — including 30% of container ship traffic—travels each year. 

Who are the Houthis?

The Houthis are a Yemeni political and military group that emerged in the 2000s and now control much of northern Yemen. The group is named after its founder, Hussein al-Houthi, and draws from the Zaydi branch of Shiite Islam. 

Although they are backed by and allied with Iran, the Houthis are not a straightforward proxy, and they often prioritize their own domestic interests. And although Iran has supplied it with sophisticated ballistic missile technology, the group has also developed the ability to assemble and manufacture its own weaponry inside Yemen. 

The group rose to prominence after capturing Sanaa in 2014. That sparked a brutal civil war against the internationally recognized government and a Saudi Arabian-led bombing campaign. The Houthis proved remarkably resilient against that air campaign, which relied on U.S. support and killed an estimated 9,000 civilians.

The group has since faced two bombing campaigns by two successive U.S. administrations.

Joe Biden, Trump’s predecessor, launched airstrikes against Yemen on January 10, 2024, “in direct response to unprecedented Houthi attacks against international maritime vessels in the Red Sea.”

Those strikes failed to deter the Houthis and only stopped when a ceasefire was brokered between Israel and Hamas in January 2025.

The Houthis resumed their attacks when Israel imposed a blockade on food and aid entering Gaza in March 2025.

Trump launched his own bombing campaign in April 2025 to stop those attacks, which ended when the Trump Administration struck a deal with the Houthis in May to end airstrikes if the group stopped attacks on shipping. The deal did not include an agreement to stop attacks against Israel, which continued until an eventual ceasefire was reached in Gaza.

After striking a truce with the Houthis, Trump said of the group: “We hit them very hard. They had a great capacity to withstand punishment.” 

“You could say there’s a lot of bravery there,” he added. 

'Outlast the war itself'

The Houthi launches come as the U.S. and Iran are reportedly engaged in indirect negotiations for the first time since the war began, and Trump’s top officials are signaling that the war may be over within weeks, despite no sign of a diplomatic breakthrough. 

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Friday that U.S. military operations were expected to be concluded in "weeks, not months".

Trump has also implied that his Administration’s objectives in Iran have been achieved and signaled the war could end within the four to six-week timeline the White House initially set out.  

"We estimated it would take approximately four to six weeks to achieve our mission, and we're way ahead of schedule," the President said during a Cabinet meeting on Thursday.  "If you look at what we've done in terms of the destruction of that country, I mean, we're way ahead." 

Juneau says that the Houthis may be able to exert some limited influence over Trump’s timeline. 

“The answer here depends on whether the Houthis further escalate or not,” he says. 

“If Houthi involvement remains limited to occasional strikes on Israel that cause little or no damage, the American calculus does not change much. If the Houthis do start attacking shipping in the Red Sea again, however, pressure on President Trump will ramp up, given that the impact on oil prices and on the global economy will be amplified.” 

“This impact, crucially, will outlast the war itself, given mounting supply chain disruptions—and could therefore hurt Republicans more as we approach the November midterm elections,” he adds.