Trump Marveled at Houthi “Bravery.” Here’s Why.

The attack on Ben Gurion Airport, the downings of U.S. drones, and attacks on naval vessels show that the Houthi movement has remained resilient despite months of bombing.

Israeli security services inspect a crater near a road outside Israel's Ben Gurion airport after a missile launched from Yemen struck near Israel's main international airport on May 4, 2025. (Photo by JACK GUEZ/AFP via Getty Images)

On the morning of May 4, a ballistic missile launched by the Yemeni group Ansar Allah, also known as the Houthis, exploded hundreds of meters from the main terminal of David Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv. Israeli and U.S. air defense batteries failed to intercept the missile, which sent travelers and staff scrambling in panic. The impact temporarily shut down operations at Israel’s most important international airport, as major foreign carriers announced that they have suspended flights to the country.

The attack prompted defiant statements from Israeli leaders vowing revenge, "Anyone who hits us, we will hit them seven times stronger,” stated Defense Minister Israel Katz. In a televised statement claiming responsibility for the attack, Ansar Allah military spokesperson Yahya Saree said that the Israeli airport was "no longer safe for air travel,” while threatening more attacks to come. The following day, in retaliation, Israeli aircraft destroyed numerous passenger planes and facilities at Sanaa International Airport in Yemen, alongside other civilian infrastructure in the country.

The Ben Gurion airport attack underlines the great difficulty the U.S. has had in confronting the Houthis, who began a military intervention after October 7 in solidarity with the besieged population of the Gaza Strip. In addition to the airport attack, Ansar Allah has attacked a number of naval vessels in the Red Sea, including aircraft carriers, while causing the losses of numerous U.S. fighter planes and surveillance drones. This week, the U.S. government announced that it had reached an agreement with the Houthis that they would stop targeting U.S. ships in exchange for an end to the U.S.-led aerial campaign against Yemen.

“You know, we hit them very hard. They had a great capacity to withstand punishment. They took tremendous punishment,” President Trump said in comments about the agreement. “You can say there’s a lot of bravery there. It was amazing what they took. But we honor their commitment and their word.”

That recent agreement does not encompass Ansar Allah’s military confrontation with Israel, which the group has vowed to continue until the Israeli siege on Gaza is lifted. The recent conflict has highlighted how Ansar Allah has continued to develop militarily and technologically through over a decade of fighting domestic enemies inside Yemen, as well as against a Saudi and Emirati military campaign backed by the U.S. that began in 2015.

Far from emerging diminished from the “tremendous punishment,” Ansar Allah is now leagues more sophisticated in both its offensive and defensive weaponry compared to 2015, as well as its domestic capacity to produce its own weapons while relying less on Iran, said a U.S. source with knowledge of the group’s evolving capabilities.

The rapid improvement of their military capacity in recent years has already given them key capabilities that exceed those of many state-led armies, and the mountainous terrain gives them the ability to bury production and storage facilities deep enough to remain safe from traditional bombing campaigns. In addition to direct arms support that the group is believed to receive from Iran, many of its munitions are said to be locally manufactured adaptations of foreign munitions, including variants of Russian and Western missiles that Ansar Allah has redesigned for their own purposes. Rather than weakening them, the continued military confrontations have seemed to strengthen Ansar Allah, by providing them more opportunities to adapt their forces to confrontation with stronger enemies.

“Yemen reached its current state after eight years of American-British aggression through their tools, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, rebuilding those capabilities and manufacturing all needs related to them—from rifles to long-range ballistic missiles, winged missiles, and drones,” Mujeeb Shamsan, said Ansar Allah’s colonel in the Moral Guidance Department, which does public relations for the Defense Ministry. “The same applies to the American aggression, alongside the British, that came to support the Zionist enemy in the Red Sea to try to break the Yemeni blockade.”

Beyond their ballistic missile attacks, the Houthis have demonstrated a shift in their air defense tactics that has alarmed U.S. observers. Over the past several weeks, the Houthis have downed U.S. drones at an unprecedented pace. In less than a month, the U.S. military lost six MQ-9 Reaper drones to Houthi air defenses, including three shot down in less than a week in mid-April.

“Our air defense shot down a hostile American MQ-9 Reaper drone while it was carrying out hostile missions in the airspace of Hajjah Governorate,” a spokesperson for the Houthis said in an official statement announcing the downing of another Reaper on April 22, adding that the drone was shot down with a “locally manufactured surface-to-air missile.”

The loss of the Reaper drones produced a catch-22 for the American military. The targeting database in Yemen created during the Saudi-led war was outdated and exhausted, meaning that fresh intelligence was needed to identify new targets. MQ-9 drones are intended to gather that intelligence, but are generally deployed against areas with minimal surface-to-air missile defenses.

“The MQ-9 drone and its predecessor, the Predator, were designed to operate in permissive environments where they would not really face a lot of air defenses. Now, they are being used against an actor that may not have top tier anti-aircraft defenses, but they do have them,” said Fabian Hinz, a research fellow for defence and military analysis at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “The Houthis inherited some air defense capabilities from the old Yemeni military, and then have received further supplies from Iran, including the 358 missile, which is specifically used for shooting medium-altitude UAVs.”

The U.S. underestimated Houthi defenses, and was thus unable to obtain the necessary new intelligence to produce worthwhile new targets. That lack of intel, apparently, led the U.S. to scrape targets from amateur sleuths on Twitter and to strike a migrant detention center, killing many and perhaps most of the people locked inside. Such strikes brought the U.S. no closer to bringing the Houthis to heel.

Roughly two dozen Reapers have been shot down over Yemen since the start of Israel’s military offensive in Gaza, according to Ansar Allah. Although unmanned, the Reapers are expensive aircraft, costing roughly $30 million each. The U.S. has confirmed that Ansar Allah’s attacks have already imposed hundreds of millions of dollars in losses on the Pentagon. The U.S. military is believed to operate a total of 230 of these drones across the globe, suggesting that as much as ten percent of the total fleet has been lost in their confrontation with the Yemeni group.

Ansar Allah is still far from being able to deliver on their threat to down manned military aircraft—except when they fall off ships dodging Houthi fire—which can travel faster and at higher altitudes than drones, but by capturing U.S. munitions, the group has gained military intelligence that they say is being exploited to improve their overall capabilities. Last week, an advanced GBU-53/B StormBreaker glide bomb, a new munition employed by the U.S. military, was found by locals in Yemen after failing to detonate. The loss has raised fears that the bomb had been turned over to Ansar Allah, potentially providing an intelligence windfall to the group’s weapons engineers, and those of their allies.

Ansar Allah officials who spoke to Drop Site confirmed that they have been working to exploit technology from captured “drones, bombs, and advanced missiles,” that have come into their possession during the fighting. “The Yemeni Armed Forces not only benefit from field confrontations at sea, air, or during direct support operations for Gaza but also from any opportunity to acquire enemy capabilities,” Colonel Shamsan told Drop Site. “If the Americans are concerned about advanced MQ-9 drones falling into Yemeni hands and how competitors like China or Russia might benefit, the same applies to bombs and missiles. If there is technology or capabilities to benefit from, Yemen will undoubtedly use, replicate, develop, or create similar versions.”

Following their most recent attacks on the MQ-9 Reapers, Ansar Allah has released what they describe as camera footage of their missiles closing in on their targets before striking. The footage does not reveal what munitions the group has been employing, but weapons experts say it is likely that they use adapted Iranian-origin weaponry produced at home.

“The Houthis have used the 358 [missile] several times for shooting down UAVs. What they are using to shoot down Reapers we don’t really know, as they cut the videos to avoid showing that information,” Hinz added. “There are two possibilities: the Houthis have gotten new, better air defense capabilities, or American commanders have become more aggressive and are taking more risks.”

Air and Sea

Prior to the diplomatic truce, U.S. officials had highlighted their ostensible success in targeting the group, claiming over 1,000 airstrikes against Ansar Allah targets since March 15 and saying that they had killed hundreds of members of the group, including senior leaders in charge of their drone and missile program. While many of the claims about killing top Ansar Allah officials have not been independently verified or acknowledged by the group, many of these strikes are believed to have killed civilians in Yemen, including the April 28 strike on the detention center housing African migrants that reportedly killed over 68 people.

In addition to its drone losses, the U.S. also lost three F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jets during the campaign. One of those jets was allegedly lost to friendly fire from the USS Gettysburg in December, while another, on April 28, fell off the USS Truman, according to U.S. officials, while conducting a sharp turn to avoid incoming fire from the Houthis. On May 6, the U.S. government announced that yet another F/A-18 had been lost after crashing into the sea amid the ongoing standoff with the group. The air campaign has already incurred costs of over $1 billion on the U.S. government as of early April, with concerns that stockpiles of critical munitions are also being depleted fighting the group. Factoring in the cost of maintaining the Truman carrier group and other offensive positioning, American forces have spent enough money fighting Yemen that the total would make up a significant proportion of the country’s entire gross domestic product of roughly $20 billion.

“We have seen a consistent, systematic development of the Houthis arsenal over the past twenty years of fighting,” said Mohammad al-Basha, a Middle East security analyst specializing in Yemen. “They now have underwater, unmanned vehicles – effectively controlled torpedoes using for coastline defenses – as well as suicide drone boats, sea mines, and at least six types of anti-ship ballistic missiles.”

The vast underground military bases and headquarters the group is known to maintain are part of the difficulty with fighting Ansar Allah from the air, as well as with targeting its leadership and production facilities. Satellite photos over the past year have shown major excavations at numerous sites where the Houthis are now believed to have built large underground military installations that are resistant to being struck from the air. The U.S. has attempted to strike these facilities with B-2 bombers during its campaign, though subsequent satellite photos showed that the Houthis were able to replace damaged tunnels and continue operating from the facilities.

Notwithstanding the domestic weapons manufacturing facilities that the Houthis have underground, some analysts contend that the group is still dependent on Iranian support for its advanced weaponry—particularly the high-end ballistic missiles that it has been firing against Israel since October 2023. These experts who specialize on Ansar Allah’s capabilities say that if this support was severed, it would be difficult for the group to maintain its higher-end capacities.

“The Houthis are still dependent on Iranian material support for their strategic weapons, which include their longer-range missiles, as well as the kind of missiles used to attack commercial ships and international naval assets. Those are essentially Iranian systems, that, as far as we know, have been transported to Yemen in disassembled form, and then reassembled once in the country,” said Taimur Khan, the head of regional operations for the Gulf region at Conflict Armament Research, an independent organization that tracks global weapon flows. “There is a move towards ‘indigenization’ of the production of some systems, primarily drones. If Iran were to stop their support overnight, they’d be in big trouble.”

Ansar Allah has downplayed Iranian or other foreign support, claiming that their armaments, including ballistic and hypersonic missiles, are now locally produced and manufactured inside Yemen. “No nation fighting a continuous eight-year war with the Saudi coalition, over a year and a half against the American-British coalition, and conducting support operations inside occupied Palestine could rely on foreign weapon supplies,” said Colonel Shamsan. “Under the ongoing siege, this is impossible, illogical, and irrational, given the intensity of offensive assets used in attacks and supporting operations against the Zionist enemy in Palestine.”

Amid the apparent detente with the U.S., Ansar Allah has vowed to continue both its attack against Israeli-linked shipping and what it calls an “aerial blockade” against Israeli airports—until the siege on the Gaza Strip is lifted. The confrontation with Israel has become a major focus of the group’s military efforts, as it has vowed to stay defiant even after major Israeli airstrikes hit Yemen this week. “We will continue to ban Israeli navigation in the Red and Arabian Seas, and to ban air traffic at Lod Airport,” a statement attributed to Ansar Allah spokesperson Yahya Saree said on Wednesday. “Our operations will continue until the aggression against Gaza stops and the blockade is lifted.”