The Houthis keep finding Israel’s soft underbelly.
It is not that they are brilliant or particularly creative.
It’s that they have been firing on the Jewish state almost constantly for two years, and their geographic distance allows them to send drone attacks from virtually any direction.
To date, their drone attacks, despite being cheaper and less advanced weapons, have by and large done far more harm than their fancier, more advanced ballistic-missile attacks.
Drones are tiny, can fly low, and have a small radar signature, allowing them to sneak past Israel’s fancy systems.
One of the worst strikes of the war was a single Hezbollah drone in the fall of 2024, which sneaked by Israeli defenses deep into Israel, hitting a full mess hall of the Golani Brigade.
The latest vulnerability the Houthis have identified is in Eilat and the southern region, as a whole.
Frequently, they send two million Israelis into bomb shelters.
This isn’t new.
The Houthis penetrated Israel’s air defense shield with drones in Eilat near the start of the war.
But then Israel adapted and moved enough air defense systems there to shoot down the drones.
If so, why have the Houthis hit Ramon Airport near Eilat once and the resort area twice in the last few weeks?
One of the consequences of this war is that, having been so long and facing such varied threats, virtually every lesson learned is forgotten.
Whoever got really good at shooting Houthi drones in Eilat around two years ago is probably long gone from that post, if they’ve remained in the IDF at all.
And the Houthis have also had an endless amount of chances to see Israel’s air defense in action and chart out when and where the vulnerabilities are.
It is not that Israel has not done a good job of shooting down Houthi threats.
The IDF has done a phenomenal job.
But if you keep letting someone shoot for two years, they will eventually get more and more shots through to strike you.
There are short-term tactical fixes. Move more of the IDF’s advanced air defense systems down to Eilat.
The IDF could even increase the volume of the old school Vulcan systems to Eilat, which it has increased use of in the North and against Hamas in Gaza.
These systems are old, but they fire so many counter shots that their chances of hitting even small objects are sometimes higher than the more advanced systems.
Yet, the real answer is ending the war.
Jerusalem's weakness
The Houthis are not deterrable in conventional terms.
Every tweet that Defense Minister Israel Katz sends, threatening them more every time they hit Israel, simply highlights Jerusalem’s powerlessness to get them to stop shooting periodic small salvos of weapons at Israel.
The only times they did not fire at Israel were during the November 23-30, 2023, and January-March 2025 ceasefires.
Stunningly, when the country debated whether it made sense to continue the war in March and reject the 10 hostages for a 60-day pause Hamas offer in August, no one even talked about the impact of the Houthis on the Jewish state by continuing the war.
True, their impact has been small.
But it has been constant, damaging, and eventually deadly.
Whether it is damaging enough to be decisive in ending the war sooner is a complex question. But leaving it out of the discussion does a disservice to those being directly and indirectly impacted.