How to Read the Houthis’ Late Entry Into the Iran War

After 30 days of promising to act and a crescendo of rhetorical pressure in which their leader pledged to join the fight “at any moment” and their officials announced “zero hour,” the Houthis fired at Israel for the first time since the US-Israeli war on Iran began. Their military spokesperson announced “a barrage” of ballistic missiles aimed at targets in southern Israel. The Israeli military confirmed it intercepted a single missile.

The Houthis, perhaps the most capable proxy in Iran’s network given the damage done to Hezbollah by Israel over the past two years, were also the last to act, and that sequence matters. A movement that spent two years disrupting global shipping, launching ballistic missiles at Israel, and branding itself as the most committed member of the Axis of Resistance sat through the killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, the decimation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp’s command structure, Hezbollah’s resumption of hostilities, andIsrael’s new ground invasion of southern Lebanon before producing a single intercepted launch.

It is worth noting that a ceasefire with the U.S. in May 2025, brokered by Oman, remains in effect. The Houthis have so far not touched a single American vessel. Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline to Yanbu is running at full capacity, with seven million barrels a day routed to the Red Sea coast to circumvent the Strait of Hormuz. That pipeline is now the world’s primary alternative for Gulf oil exports, and the Houthis sit on the other end of it. They understand exactly what that means, and the fact that Saudi tankers are still loading at Yanbu suggests that the Houthis’ hands may be tied by arrangements of which we are not yet aware.

However, what looks like leverage for the Houthis could in reality be a trap. If they break the ceasefire with the U.S., they risk drawing the Trump administration back into a direct campaign against them and losing Oman as a mediator. The environment that tolerated Houthi strikes on Saudi energy infrastructure in 2019 and 2022, in the aftermath of the first Trump administration’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, no longer exists. With Hormuz closed and Yanbu functioning as the world’s emergency oil corridor, any disruption would invite a response from a far wider coalition than the Houthis have previously faced. And although Houthi deputy information minister Mohammed Mansour told Al Jazeera on March 28 that closing the Bab al-Mandab is “among our options,” naming a card is not the same as playing it.

Houthi Supply Pipeline Also Faces Threats

Bandar Abbas, the Iranian origin point of the smuggling pipeline that built the Houthi arsenal, is under sustained bombardment. The IRGC’s 1st Naval District Commander was killed there on March 23. Forces of Yemen’s internationally recognized government intercepted a vessel near Bab al-Mandab on March 27, the third interception in less than 20 days. The ship had left Bandar Abbas on March 12, while the port was being struck, and was heading to Salif in Hodeidah. The cargo was modest: copper wire and medicines. As far as is known, there were no missile components, guidance electronics, seekers, or engines. The Houthis claim they can manufacture weapons domestically, but domestic assembly requires imported components at every level, from the most advanced guidance systems down to basic wiring. The Houthis lack a steady supply of any of that. When a movement cannot reliably get copper wire into the country, it cannot sustain a missile campaign.

Meanwhile, in July 2025, a single U.S. Central Command operation seized 750 tons of Iranian materiel, including hundreds of missiles, warheads, seekers, drone engines, and radar systems. In October alone, there were 58 containers seized at the Port of Aden carrying roughly 2,500 tons of drone manufacturing equipment. More than80% of interdicted items were manufacturing inputs. The pipeline has shifted from smuggling complete systems to attempting to sustain domestic assembly, and even that reduced flow is being intercepted. Nothing in this record supports the assumption that the Houthis can sustain what they just started. The interdiction campaign has shifted the conflict from a contest of capability to a contest of sustainability, and that is a contest the Houthis are structurally positioned to lose in the short term.

Interdiction only works as long as someone is doing the interception. The Bandar Abbas sea route is the fat target, and it has been hit by CENTCOM. The problem is that choking the formal pipeline does not stop the flow but disperses it into routes that are harder to see and to catch. The Omani corridor through al-Mahra has been a smuggling highway for decades, and Muscat’s role in border enforcement will be critical. The Horn of Africa offers thousands of miles of effectively ungoverned coastline, with dhow traffic crossing the Gulf of Aden in volumes that make it nearly impossible to distinguish smuggling from commerce. Eritrea has facilitated Iranian transfers before, and Somalia’s coast is open. A UN Panel of Experts confirmed that cooperation with the Somali Islamist militia al-Shabaab now involves weapons smuggling, technical training, and logistical support. Land routes from both directions feed into Houthi territory through geography that does not change with administrations. The United States is succeeding at interdiction right now because it is applying maximum resources to a supply chain that is also being hit at the source. Both conditions are temporary. The Houthis do not need to win the interdiction battle; they only need to outlast it.

Meanwhile, Yemen’s internationally recognized government has reported that Iranian personnel entered Hodeidah by dhow from the Horn of Africa in the days before the Houthis’ March 28 launch. If personnel can still be smuggled into the country, so can components. The interdiction campaign is squeezing the pipeline, but it has not sealed it.

The most underreported element of Houthi capability is Iranian oil, which enters Yemen through a network of front companies with IRGC ties. Israeli strikes hit the fuel infrastructure at Hodeidah and Ras Isa in 2025, degrading the revenue and logistics architecture the Houthis depend on to function as a governing entity. The Trump administration ended the general license for petroleum offloading at Houthi ports in April 2025. The U.S. Treasury Department has sanctioned the terminals, port managers, and vessels still making deliveries. The UN Panel of Experts estimated that the Houthis collected roughly $4 billion in customs duties on fuel imports between 2022 and 2024. That revenue stream is under pressure from every direction.

Furthermore, Houthi ballistic missiles are both solid and liquid-fueled. Their Scud variants run on propellants that require imports. When the fuel supply is choked, it is not just the Houthi economy that suffers but the launch capability. Fuel is the binding constraint on the Houthis’ ability to do the one thing they just did, and this is the most important variable in the sustainability question and the least discussed.

To understand the Houthis’ ability to project further launch capacity, the UN Panel of Experts reported that between September 2024 and July 2025, 101 ballistic missiles were fired from Houthi-controlled areas toward Israel according to the Israeli government. 38 failed outright, meaning more than a third of the missiles never reached the target area.

The Houthis can still launch as they demonstrated on Saturday, but every launch depletes reserves that are not being replenished at anywhere near the rate they are being consumed. This means that they cannot sustain anything resembling the tempo of their 2024 campaign.

Launch Timing is the Tell

The Houthis fired on the same day that Pakistan announced it would host foreign ministers from Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt for two days of ceasefire talks. They also fired while Iran has yet to respond to a U.S.15-point ceasefire proposal and while U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was telling G7 allies that the war would continue another two to four weeks.

Given the timing and the month-long delay, the launch reads less as an operational decision than as a political one. The cost of continued silence was higher than the cost of a launch. A movement that told its fighters this was a divine cause could not sit through a second month without acting and retain any credibility.

However, while the missile was generating headlines, the Houthis were still killing people in Yemen. Four soldiers from the Southern Forces died in separate attacks on the Dhalea and Harib fronts. Mortar shelling on one front. A direct assault on the other. This received no international coverage.

On the same day, Houthi state media ran stories about launching summer indoctrination courses across Hodeidah, Hajjah, and Ibb under the slogan “Knowledge and Jihad,” making it clear that the conscription apparatus runs in parallel with missile launches because the ground force is the Houthis’ main asset, and the missiles are the sideshow. The Houthis’ primary threat remains their expansion into the rest of Yemen to capture more territory and oil infrastructure. For that, they need fewer missiles and more manpower, and manpower is the one resource in northern Yemen that does not require imports.