Despite American efforts to keep the Gaza war from spreading, Iran keeps pushing proxies to get involved. The Houthis in Yemen have been particularly compliant. They use Iranian supplied missiles to attack Israel (not always effective, some have landed in Jordan and Egypt) and to disrupt international shipping through the Red Sea and Suez Canal. Their latest attacks on civilian vessels resulted in the Indian and Pakistani navies sending warships to protect the freedom of the seas. The US put together a multi-national force with the same objective. What no one has yet seen is whether the Americans will supplement their defensive measures of shooting down Houthi missiles and drones with attacks on the source. Yemen obviously expects this to happen and has been preceding it with bombastic claims that they are not deterred and will sink the US navy.
Israel has destroyed missiles launched at it from Yemen (and so have the Jordanians and Saudis) but has encountered limitations on the projection of power over such a great distance. The IDF appears to have responded only by bombing Iranian weapons delivery sites in Syria. In doing so, they did kill the head of the Iranian munitions delivery program when he was in Syria. Iran was openly upset, but not enough to try to go toe to toe with Israel. They are still leaving that to their puppets. One of them, Hezbollah, in Lebanon, has been very careful to keep their military activities within strict limitations.
In Gaza, Hamas seems to be confident that they are going to be able to survive in power. The lower intensity of IDF operations, mostly due to international pressure over ‘humanitarian’ considerations, is another cause for Hamas optimism.
So far, Hamas has been able to follow a game plan that has Israel spending a lot of money on the campaign (and it hasn’t much affected the value of the Israeli Shekel on the world markets) while Hamas gets munitions for free from Iran and has lots of international donors to fund every other aspect of the war, including the ability to skim off large sums for the Hamas leaders.
Wetherhorn 