Houthi Drone Strike Highlights Dilemmas for Israel

Israel faces a strategic dilemma over how best to retaliate for the drone attack on Tel Aviv claimed by Yemen’s Houthi militia, which is based thousands of miles from Israel’s southern borders.

The attack, which struck an apartment building early on Friday near the United States diplomatic compound, killing one person and wounded several others, has heightened concerns in Israel about the threat of Iran. Tehran funds and encourages militias opposed to Israel throughout the region, including Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, in addition to the Houthis in Yemen.

On a technical level, the attack highlighted the weakness of Israel’s air defense system against unmanned aircraft, which travel at slower speeds, fly at lower altitudes and emit less heat than high-velocity rockets and shells. According to military experts, those factors make it harder for drones to be tracked by radar and intercepted by surface-to-air missiles.

Yoav Gallant, the Israeli defense minister, has vowed revenge for the attack, but analysts said this weekend that Israel had few obvious options against a militia that shares no common border with Israel and has appeared undeterred by earlier displays of force by Western powers.

One immediate, short-term response, some analysts said, might be a cease-fire deal between Hamas and Israel, a move that could halt attacks from Hamas’s allies, like the Houthis and Hezbollah in Lebanon. While the Houthis’ opposition to Israel long preceded the war in Gaza, the group had rarely attacked Israeli interests before it began.

A truce in Gaza could “prompt some kind of a lull for a while” in Yemen and Lebanon, said Relik Shafir, a former general in the Israeli Air Force.

But while mediators say they are edging closer to sealing a Gaza cease-fire, key gaps between Israel and Hamas remain, and parts of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition oppose compromising on Hamas’s main demands. In the long term, the Houthis also remain committed to Israel’s total destruction and would most likely not be placated for long by a temporary truce in Gaza or an end to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.

The Houthis are a Yemeni Shiite militia that over the past decade seized control of large parts of western Yemen, including its capital, Sana, and Red Sea coastline. In solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza, it has since November attacked merchant ships in the Red Sea that it says have links to Israel. Hundreds of ships have been forced to take a lengthy detour around southern Africa, driving up costs.

To deter such attacks, the United States and Britain began striking Houthi assets in January. But the effort has had little effect: The Houthis have continued with their assaults on both civilian and military vessels.

If Israel were to join in retaliation for the Houthi strike in Tel Aviv, it is unlikely that would be the decisive factor in changing the Houthis’ behavior, analysts say.

“What would be the benefit?” asked Ehud Yaari, an Israeli analyst of the Arab world. “If we enter the scene and we contribute our own strikes to dozens and dozens of strikes carried out by the U.S. and the U.K., that’s not going to shift to this scale.”

Others believe that militias like the Houthis can be constrained if Israel focuses its ire on their benefactor, Iran. They say that Iran could rein in its proxies if it is made to understand the cost of its support for them.

Otherwise, Iran is “yet again, going to get away with it,” said Miri Eisin, a former Israeli intelligence official and senior fellow at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism, a research group in Israel.

Iran has, however, escalated its actions against Israel after earlier Israeli attacks on Iranian interests.

Israel killed several high-ranking Iranian officials in April in an attack on an Iranian government building in Syria, partly because senior Israeli officials believed that such a brazen assault would act as a deterrent against Iran. Instead, the attack achieved the opposite, prompting Iran to target Israel with one of the largest barrages of ballistic missiles and drones in military history.

Whatever Israel’s response to the Houthis’ drone strike, it will still be left with the technical challenge of shoring up its defenses against slow-moving drones.

Over the past nine months, Israel’s air defense system — partly developed in partnership with the United States — has proved relatively adept at blocking thousands of enemy missiles, whether the ballistic missiles from Iran or thousands of rockets fired from Gaza.

But the system has repeatedly struggled to identify, track and destroy drones, particularly those fired by Hezbollah from Lebanon. Footage broadcast by Hezbollah in June provided a particularly sharp example of Israel’s air defense weaknesses: Filmed from a drone that had evaded Israel’s air defenses, the footage showed sensitive installations in the city of Haifa in northern Israel.

Flying at low altitudes and speeds, the drones are difficult to pick out from the “clutter” of small private planes and other aircraft, according to Mr. Shafir, the former air force general.

“We can’t hermetically close all the borders,” Mr. Shafir said. “What the drones can do is infiltrate every now and then through the defenses. And this is the result.”

Here’s what else is happening:

• E.U. Aid: The European Union plans to send $435 million in grants and loans to shore up the Palestinian Authority, which administers parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, in an attempt to prevent the body’s insolvency. European officials said in a statement Friday that they were conditioning the tranches of aid on wide-ranging reforms in the Palestinian Authority, some of which had to be enacted by the end of August.

  For months, the Palestinian Authority has faced a fiscal crisis caused largely by Israeli sanctions, stoking fears of bankruptcy. However, Israel appeared to back the European announcement. The Israeli Foreign Ministry said the European Union had demanded reforms that were important to Israel, and called the deal “an important step that should be fully implemented without hesitation.”

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington, and Aaron Boxerman from Jerusalem.