Yemen’s Houthis enter Iran war with attack on Israel, while Marines arrive in region
CAIRO – The risk of an expanded Iran war grew on Saturday as Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthis on Saturday launched their first attacks on Israel since the start of the conflict, even as additional U.S. forces reached the Middle East.
Speaking before the strike, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the United States expected to conclude military operations within weeks, although a new deployment of U.S. Marines started arriving in the region. The Houthis said they would continue their operations until the “aggression” on all fronts ended.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian spoke to Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, whose government hosts a meeting with the Turkish and Saudi foreign ministers on Sunday to seek to ease regional tensions.
But there is no sign of an immediate diplomatic breakthrough and the war, launched with U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran on Feb . 28, has spread across the Middle East, killing thousands and hitting the world economy with the biggest-ever disruption to global energy supplies.
Washington has dispatched two contingents of thousands of Marines to the Middle East, the first of which arrived Friday on an amphibious assault ship, the U.S. military said Saturday.
The U.S. could achieve its aims without ground troops, Rubio said Friday, but acknowledged it was deploying some to the region so Trump would have “maximum” flexibility to adjust strategy as needed.
The Pentagon is also expected to deploy thousands of soldiers from its 82nd Airborne Division.
Lebanese journalists, rescue workers hit
On Saturday, Israel said it had carried out a wave of attacks on Tehran, targeting what the military said were infrastructure sites belonging to Iran’s government.
It also hit targets in Lebanon, where it has resumed its war against Iran-backed Hezbollah, killing three Lebanese journalists in a strike on a media vehicle, Lebanon’s Al Manar TV reported, as well as a Lebanese soldier. A follow‑up strike on the rescue workers sent to assist them also caused fatalities.
Israel’s military said it had targeted one of the journalists, whom it called a “terrorist,” accusing him of being part of a Hezbollah intelligence unit, and saying he had reported on locations of Israeli soldiers.
Iran kept up attacks on Israel and several Gulf states after hitting an air base in Saudi Arabia on Friday and wounding 12 U.S. military personnel, two of them seriously, in one of the most serious breaches of U.S. air defenses so far.
Air defenses shot down a drone near the residence of the leader of the Iraqi Kurdish ruling party, Masoud Barzani, in Erbil, security sources told Reuters early Sunday. Security sources said on Saturday that a drone attack targeted the home of the president of Iraq’s Kurdistan Region.
Houthis can strike targets far from Yemen
Israel, which regularly faced missile attacks from the Houthis before the war, confirmed a missile had been fired at it from Yemen. There were no reports of casualties or damage.
The attack pointed to a potential new threat to global shipping, already hit by the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the conduit for about a fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas supplies.
Houthi military spokesperson Yahya Saree later said the group carried out a second attack on Israel in less than 24 hours using missiles and drones, and vowed to continue military operations in the coming days.
The Houthis have shown an ability to strike targets far beyond Yemen and disrupt shipping lanes around the Arabian Peninsula and the Red Sea, as they did in support of Hamas in the Gaza war.
On Friday, they said they were prepared to act if what they called an escalation against Iran and the “Axis of Resistance” continued in the war.
If the Houthis open a new front in the conflict, one target could be the Bab al-Mandab Strait off the coast of Yemen, a chokepoint for sea traffic toward the Suez Canal.