Israeli officials concerned over Houthis' successful offensive in Yemen; Netanyahu said to offer military support

Israeli officials concerned over Houthis' successful offensive in Yemen; Netanyahu said to offer military support

All Israel News Staff

The Houthis' shocking recent successes, and the U.S. hesitation to help the Saudi-backed Yemeni government forces stop the terror group's advance, which has now captured the strategic coast along the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, have set off alarm bells in Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly even offered Israeli military participation in a broader regional effort to counter the Iranian-backed Houthi militia in Yemen, the Lebanese Hezbollah-affiliated news outlet Al-Akhbar reported on Friday, citing unnamed U.S. sources.

The report comes after the Houthis seized the Yemeni port city of al-Mokha earlier this week, near the strategically important Strait of Bab al-Mandeb on the Red Sea. Much of the world’s commercial shipping passes through the Strait. The Houthis, who openly call for Israel’s destruction, began attacking Israel and international commercial shipping shortly after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 terror attack on southern Israel.

The Israeli government has neither confirmed nor denied the report of potential Israeli military involvement. Speaking on condition of anonymity, an Israeli official warned on Friday that Houthi control of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait could be even more dangerous than the Iranian regime’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.

“They will be able to fire at whatever they want with anti-tank missiles. They will be able to see the ships with their own eyes,” the official toldIsrael's N12 News, warning that it "gives enormous power to the terror organization."

Ariel Oseran, senior Middle East correspondent for i24 News, expressed similar concerns, warning that Houthi control of the area could threaten international shipping and Saudi trade.

“This will allow them to pose a more direct threat to shipping in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, thus increasing the threat to Saudi Arabia. A former Yemeni Military official tells me that the boasting by Yemeni government forces yesterday was actually a cover for their losses on the coastline,” Oseran assessed.

The Houthis have fired hundreds of ballistic missiles and drones at Israel over the past three years. Israel has responded with strikes against key Houthi sites across Yemen.

The unconfirmed report suggests that Israel could potentially join a broader regional campaign against the Houthis to prevent the group from threatening international shipping through the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait.

Arab Gulf states, particularly Saudi Arabia, are also concerned about the Houthi offensive near the strategic waterway.

On Thursday, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) urged U.S. President Donald Trump to order strikes against the Houthis. However, Trump reportedly rejected the Saudi request to involve American forces, according to an Axios report that cited two unnamed U.S. officials.

Instead, Washington reportedly offered to provide Saudi Arabia with intelligence and targeting data on Houthi positions. There are reportedly some 200 U.S. military personnel in Saudi Arabia who could potentially assist the Saudi military.

While Saudi Arabia possesses a modern military equipped largely with U.S.-made weapons systems, it has limited combat experience and has traditionally relied on U.S. military support against external threats.

Meanwhile, the Israeli news outlet Ma'arivreported onTuesday that Jerusalem is monitoring the Houthi takeover of Mokha port near Bab el-Mandeb.

IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Eyal Zamir and Israel Navy Commander Vice Adm. Eyal Harel warned the Houthis and the Iranian regime this week against threatening Israel.

“We removed and pushed back existential threats that had been built up against us for years,” Zamir said. “We will not allow existential threats to emerge from radical enemies, and we will not allow terrorist organizations to establish themselves along our borders.”

The IDF chief also directly addressed the Houthi offensive near Bab el-Mandeb.

“In Bab el-Mandeb, in the heart of Beirut, in Lebanon’s ports and off the coast of Gaza, we proved that the IDF’s long arm is powerful, determined and reaches everywhere to strike those who seek to harm us.”

Choose You This Day…War or Peace

Choose You This Day…War or Peace

Terry James

The Word of God tells us that this is the condition of fallen humanity since Eden. We cry “peace, peace, when there is no peace” (Jeremiah 6:14 and Jeremiah 8:11, with a similar thought also found in Ezekiel 13:16 and Micah 3:5).

That we are still in the throes of war that destroys earthly peace is proven hourly in our news feeds. Ironically, one appropriate example involves the writer of War and Peace in an indirect way.

Pyotr Tolstoy, deputy chairman of the State Duma and great-great-grandson of Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, has called for massed bombing of Ukrainian cities to break the resistance of the people living in them and force a surrender, the news outlet 24 Kanal reported.

Russia denies striking civilians and claims after each attack that it hit military targets, even as its missiles land on homes, hospitals, power plants, and food depots. Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Heorhii Tykhyi said Tolstoy’s words should be grounds for an International Criminal Court arrest warrant, calling them a Russian official’s demand for war crimes.

What Tolstoy has urged in public, Russian forces have done for more than 12 years while denying it.

The presenter proposed emptying the cities.

On the state talk show Vremya Pokazhet, which Tolstoy hosts, he was reminded that more than 20 million people live in Ukraine and asked what would become of them if the country were turned to scorched earth. He proposed warning residents a day before strikes so they could flee their homes.

“You think we are calling for cruelty? We are calling for demoralizing the population so thoroughly that it comes out to meet our troops with its little paws up,” Tolstoy said.

Then he named the reason.

In the end, Tolstoy described what Ukraine means for Russia’s plans.

“[Ukraine] is the kind of territory that will allow us to export our energy resources to Europe by the short route,” he said. (“A senior Russian official said out loud what Russia’s missiles do every night,” 24 Kanal,  RR News August 29, 2026)

It becomes more obvious with each passing day that Russia is building toward war. Whether such war can be contained to Putin’s need to conquer Ukraine is questionable. Because he is losing the ability to act as the strongman leader in not having yet defeated the smaller foe, the question is: Might the thought to instigate a wider war in order to prove himself be the “evil thought” Ezekiel the prophet referred to in the Gog-Magog prophecy?

War is inevitable, and peace is not possible in this post-Eden fallen world. James the apostle says the following about this matter.

“From whence come wars and fightings among you? come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members? Ye lust, and have not: ye kill, and desire to have, and cannot obtain: ye fight and war, yet ye have not, because ye ask not” (James 4:1-2).

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Iran-backed Houthis claim to hit Saudi base with missiles, drones amid renewed fighting

Iran-backed Houthis claim to hit Saudi base with missiles, drones amid renewed fighting

TOI

Houthi fighters on Sunday said they used drones and missiles to attack a military base in southern Saudi Arabia as renewed fighting with Yemen’s government forces forced growing numbers of civilians to flee.

The attack at the southern Sharurah base targeted “weapons depots and command and control centers that are managing the aggression against our nation and people,” Houthi military spokesman Yahya Saree wrote on X.

The date of the operation was not specified. Clashes have increased this week between the Iran-allied Houthis and Yemeni government forces, which are backed by Riyadh.

Sirens went off in the province on Saturday, according to the Saudi civil defense, which didn’t report casualties or damage.

The civil defense also said a projectile fell in al-Tawwal governorate near the border with Yemen along the Red Sea, injuring two people and damaging a mosque and several other buildings. The statement blamed the Houthis.

Earlier Saturday, Yemeni government forces said they had struck Houthi fighters in the Red Sea city of Mocha, and later attacked other Houthi positions in the southwestern part of the country

“Air Force of the Armed Forces targeted positions and barracks of the terrorist Houthi group with three airstrikes” in the Taiz region, the Yemeni military said Sunday in a post on X.

The government news agency Saba reported that Yemeni “forces destroyed vehicles and weapons and killed members of the Houthi terrorist militia” near the port of Mocha, and quoted a spokesman for the forces as saying they had also struck Houthi targets just outside the city.

The Houthis, meanwhile, said Saturday evening that over the past 48 hours, “Saudi enemy aircraft conducted 129 airstrikes” on areas under their control.

The ongoing clashes follow a week-long Houthi offensive that culminated in the group capturing the remainder of Yemen’s Red Sea coast and several strategic islands, cementing their hold on the Bab al-Mandab Strait at the sea’s southern entrance.

The waterway has become an important artery for Saudi Arabian oil exports after Iran largely cut off shipments through the Gulf with its blockade on the Strait of Hormuz.

The Houthis have recently declared their own maritime blockade of Riyadh’s Red Sea ports.

US news site Axios reported Friday that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman twice called US President Donald Trump to request strikes on the Houthis last week, but that the request was rejected.

Trump on Saturday acknowledged speaking to the de facto Saudi leader but said the Houthis had also “called us and they don’t want to fight with us.”

He did not elaborate on whether Washington would take any action, but told reporters that “everything’s gonna work out fine and dandy” in the region.

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The world is learning to love the bomb again

The world is learning to love the bomb again

Dudi Kogan

The past year has transformed the nuclear debate: The last US-Russia arms-control treaty expired, Trump ordered nuclear testing to resume and China is rapidly expanding its capabilities. At the same time, countries that had never publicly contemplated going nuclear are now openly discussing it.

On Aug. 6 this year, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi stood before tens of thousands of people in Hiroshima's Peace Memorial Park. At 8:15 a.m., the Peace Bell rang and the crowd observed a minute of silence at the precise time when, 81 years earlier, the city was illuminated by a flash that changed history. Hiroshima Mayor Kazumi Matsui repeated the appeal made each year at the ceremony, urging world leaders to stop treating nuclear deterrence as a "realistic approach." This time, however, his words may also have been directed at the leader standing beside him.

About eight months earlier, Japanese media reported something that would have been difficult to imagine in previous years. A senior official in the Prime Minister's Office who advises Takaichi on security told reporters that Japan should begin discussing whether to acquire nuclear weapons. He stressed that this was his personal view, citing Japan's deteriorating security environment and doubts about the credibility of the US nuclear deterrent.

Neither of these developments is unique to Japan. The world order that has shaped our lives at least since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and perhaps since the end of World War II, is unraveling everywhere.

"After the Cold War, under US leadership but with its allies as well, a new international order was established, based on international institutions, laws, rules and legal frameworks. That order is collapsing before our eyes," said Dr. Or Rabinowitz, a senior researcher at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

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Adversaries Using Claude AI To Target Americans And Develop Missiles Is A Sign Of What’s To Come

Adversaries Using Claude AI To Target Americans And Develop Missiles Is A Sign Of What’s To Come

Joseph Trevithick

Earlier this year, an Iran-linked actor used Anthropic’s Claude artificial intelligence model to scrape and analyze data with the aim of helping target U.S. naval forces in the Middle East. A group in Yemen – very likely Iranian-backed Houthi militants – also used Claude to assist with work on guidance systems for ballistic and hypersonic missiles.

These are just some of the revelations about how adversaries and other malign actors have been using one of the premier pieces of AI software being developed in the United States that were contained in a new report Anthropic released late yesterday. The 154-page document also details instances where Claude was used directly and indirectly to support intelligence gathering and surveillance, cyberattacks, influence operations, and even worrisome biological research over the past eight months. In addition to Iran and Yemen, the human actors behind these activities were based in Russia, China, and a host of other countries.

Anthropic has shared details about what it calls the “misuse” of its models in the past, but describes the new report as its “most detailed” to date. The company has clearly been cataloging these case studies, and has assigned each one a control number. Though the entire contents of the report are cause for concern, the explicit attempt to use Claude to target American forces, as well as to develop new higher-end missiles and other military technology, are particular standouts and signs of what’s to come, as we will highlight below.

GTG-30005 is the case study dealing with the targeting of U.S. naval forces, and the summary is as follows:

“In another investigation, we identified and disrupted an Iran-nexus threat actor that used Claude to collect and analyze publicly accessible data to develop targeting recommendations against US naval forces in the region. The threat actor used Claude to compile targeting handbooks, through a Python pipeline the threat actor built with Claude’s assistance, to identify and track naval positions based on open-source information. The compiled material included a roster of US personnel scraped from captions on public military photographs; publicly accessible ship and aircraft transponder identifiers; commercial satellite-imagery query scripts; and an inventory of public websites that exposed US naval movements. The threat actor also directed Claude to compile vulnerability research on shipboard systems, cataloging known CVEs in maritime VSAT terminals, Cisco communications equipment, and industrial control products.”

“We banned the actor’s account, developed detections to reduce the risk of future misuse, and shared threat intelligence with government authorities to disrupt the threat.”

How exactly Anthropic defines the term “nexus” here is not immediately clear, and other entries in its new report also use “state-nexus” in addition to country-based variations. However, in this specific case, an addendum is added to the entry that explicitly says that the same account was separately tied to “domestic mass surveillance” software development work “for Iranian state systems,” clearly pointing to an actor directly linked to the regime in Tehran.

Whether or not any of the data collected and analysed here was directly used to subsequently carry out attacks on U.S. forces is unknown. However, there have been media reports just in recent weeks that Iran has been increasingly trying to strike American warships. Those same reports have raised questions about how the country has been prosecuting those operations given its limited capabilities and capacity to track maritime targets far from its shores. The possibility that Russia or China could be supplying targeting data has been put forward.

The use of AI technology by nation-state armed forces to develop target sets and engage them is already known to be growing globally. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have been a pioneer in this regard, but the U.S. military, China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA), and others are also known to be developing and fielding these capabilities.

U.S. military officials have also voiced increasing concern in recent years about the ability to track the movements and disposition of U.S. military assets and personnel using publicly available pictures and other data. There has been much talk, in turn, about how to balance transparency and operational security.

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