Behind the scenes of Israel’s strike on the Houthi leadership

Approximately 200 soldiers in Military Intelligence spent weeks gathering information before discovering details of the meeting that the IDF bombed.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Last Thursday’s “Drop of Luck” operation, in which the IDF struck a meeting attended by nearly the entire Houthi leadership and killed at least 12 senior figures, was the product of weeks of intelligence work, Kan News reported Tuesday.

After fending off hundreds of missiles and drones launched from Yemen in support of Hamas over the past 22 months, Israel’s leadership decided in early July to target top Houthi officials instead of limiting strikes to infrastructure such as ports and power facilities.

About 200 soldiers and officers from various IDF intelligence branches, including Units 8200, 9900, and 504, worked from a secret bunker in central Israel to track the targets, according to the report.

Representatives of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) also participated in the effort, the report said.

When the Research Division learned that a Cabinet meeting with senior military officials was imminent, it alerted the head of the Operations Division in Military Intelligence.

Plans for several scenarios were drawn up, but investigators eventually traced the meeting to a large villa in a residential area of Sana’a.

Security officials told Kan that holding the meeting there, instead of in a government building, showed the Houthis were trying to conceal it.

Once the intelligence was confirmed, the air force received rapid approval to bomb the house from IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir, Defense Minister Israel Katz and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Multiple missiles were fired at the site, shaking the ground with the powerful explosions.

The strike killed Ahmad Ghaleb al-Rahawi, the Houthis’ figurehead prime minister, and nine other ministers, leaving only four cabinet members alive.

The security sources told Kan that Israel was still unsure about the fate of two of its primary targets there, the Houthis’ powerful defense minister, Mohamed al-Atifi, and Chief of Staff Muhammad Abd al-Karim al-Ghamari, who oversee all the anti-Israel air operations.

The report noted that the attack accorded with international laws of war due to the presence of the military personnel.

The meeting was partly convened to watch Abdul Malik al-Houthi, the group’s real leader and officially al-Rahawi’s deputy, deliver a televised speech from another location.

After the strike, he assumed the role of prime minister in the Houthi government, which controls about half of Yemen.

Although not targeted at this time, al-Houthi is considered one of Israel’s top assassination priorities given his role as leader of Iran’s only proxy still posing an immediate threat to the country.

Other Western governments also see him as a key target, due to Houthi attacks on shipping lanes near Yemen that have threatened global commerce.

Kan’s sources said that the 46-year-old leader has acted accordingly, living underground or in caves for years and pre-recording his speeches to avoid detection.

Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah used similar tactics for more than a decade before the IAF killed him last September by dropping some 80 bombs on his bunker deep underground in the heart of a civilian neighborhood of Beirut.

After the operation, Katz warned that Israel was not finished punishing and deterring the Iranian proxy.

This was “just the beginning,” he said. “The Houthis will learn the hard way that whoever threatens and harms Israel will be harmed sevenfold.”

According to a report by London-based Asharq Al-Awsat, several high-ranking Houthi officials have fled the capital in recent days for other regions controlled by the group, including the interior minister and intelligence chief.