Yemen’s Ansar Allah has declared an air blockade on Israel following a missile strike on Ben Gurion Airport—and vowed to escalate further after Israel responded with airstrikes on Sanaa’s civilian infrastructure. “The Israeli aggression will not deter Yemen from continuing its operations in support of the oppressed in Gaza,” senior Ansar Allah official Mohammad al-Bukhaiti said this morning following the bombing of Sanaa International Airport, power stations, and a cement factory.

Sunday’s missile strike near Terminal 3 of Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv marked a strategic turning point—not simply for its reach or symbolism, but for the direct military and economic challenge it poses to Israel and its U.S.-backed defense systems.

The Yemeni Armed Forces, the military wing of Ansar Allah, launched a missile that traveled more than 2,000 kilometers before striking the entrance of Israel’s busiest airport. The projectile bypassed multiple layers of Israeli and U.S. air defenses, including the Arrow 2, Arrow 3, and THAAD systems. The missile created a 25-meter crater on impact, causing widespread disruption to air traffic, though no fatalities were reported.

The failure to intercept the missile has caused great embarrassment to the Israeli military. Yet dealt a greater blow to the US Trump administration’s ongoing assault on Yemen, which the American President had claimed back in March to have “decimated” Ansarallah and its capabilities.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu swiftly vowed retaliation, writing on X, “Israel will respond to the Houthi attack against our main airport AND, at a time and place of our choosing, to their Iranian terror masters,” claiming that Yemen’s attacks “emanate from Iran”.

Multiple Israeli and American officials have since accused Iran of directing the strike, a charge Tehran denies. The timing coincides with renewed nuclear negotiations involving U.S. President Donald Trump and came just hours before Iran publicly unveiled its Qassem Basir ballistic missile—a 1,200-kilometer-range weapon developed specifically to bypass Israeli defenses

Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, along with a number of regional experts, suggested that Israel’s escalation is a calculated effort to derail those talks, placing the region on edge, where even a spark between Yemen and Israel could ignite into a broader war.

On the same day as the Ben Gurion strike, Israel launched coordinated airstrikes against targets in Yemen, Lebanon, and Syria—an expansive show of force that could collapse what’s left of the already fragile regional stability.

Then on May 6, 2025, Israel launched a series of airstrikes targeting key infrastructure in Yemen’s capital, Sanaa.  The Israeli military reported that these strikes fully disabled Sanaa International Airport, destroyed a cement factory, and hit multiple power stations. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) stated that these facilities were used by Ansar Allah for transferring weapons and operatives.

Ansar Allah, for its part, declared the beginning of a comprehensive aerial blockade of Israel in retaliation for the ongoing assault on Gaza and what it described as a deliberate policy of starvation targeting Palestinian civilians. Yahya Saree, spokesperson for the Yemeni Armed Forces, stated the group would “repeatedly target airports” to enforce the blockade until aid is allowed into Gaza.

Even online, Israel hasn’t been safe from Ansar Allah’s reach. The group has issued direct threats in Hebrew and disseminated military statements across Israeli social media platforms, challenging Israel’s long-standing dominance in psychological and information warfare.

Israel launched a wave of airstrikes on the Yemeni port city of Hodeidah on Monday, hitting civilian infrastructure, including port facilities and a cement factory. Yemen’s Minister of Information, Hashem Sharaf al-Din, said the strikes would only expand the group’s “target bank” inside Israel.

The strikes also sent ripples through international aviation, with several global airlines suspending flights to and from Israel, citing ongoing missile threats and instability.

At the heart of the conflict lies a growing asymmetry: Israel’s use of multimillion-dollar interceptor systems to counter Ansar Allah’s relatively low-cost missiles presents a strategic and financial imbalance increasingly unsustainable for Tel Aviv.

Despite the blow to Israel’s military prestige, many in the Israeli press focused on what the breach reveals about the country’s vulnerabilities. Observers noted that the missile used was of a fixed-trajectory type—typically easier to intercept—yet none of Israel’s (or the U.S.’s) advanced defense layers managed to stop it.

This failure has raised difficult questions about the effectiveness of Israeli air defenses, particularly when facing determined resistance movements capable of deploying long-range projectiles on a shoestring budget.

Janatan Sayeh of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies told Yediot Aharonot that “this is asymmetric warfare by design. You don’t need to inflict mass casualties. You just need to make your adversary bleed money.”

Ansar Allah’s low-cost, high-impact strategy exemplifies the economic pressure tactics that now define resistance operations in the region, where strategic gains are made not just through force, but through financial attrition.

Israeli military officials have since warned that further actions may be imminent. Ansar Allah has reiterated that airports and critical infrastructure will remain within its sights so long as Gaza continues to suffer bombardment and blockade.

The evolution of Ansar Allah from a regional insurgency into a long-range actor with strategic reach reveals the emergence of a new reality. No longer confined to Yemen’s borders, the group is now helping shape the trajectory of the broader Middle East conflict—and in doing so, is redefining resistance in the 21st century.

Editor’s Note | This article was updated on May 6, 2025, to include new developments following Israel’s strikes on Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, and a statement from a senior Ansar Allah official responding to the escalation.

Feature photo | Israeli security forces examine the crater where an Ansar Allah-fired missile struck near Ben Gurion International Airport on May 4, 2025. Ohad Zwigenberg | AP

Robert Inlakesh is a political analyst, journalist and documentary filmmaker currently based in London, UK. He has reported from and lived in the occupied Palestinian territories and hosts the show ‘Palestine Files’. Director of ‘Steal of the Century: Trump’s Palestine-Israel Catastrophe’. Follow him on Twitter @falasteen47

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