Yemen: On August 28, the Zionist entity carried out a desperate and cowardly attempt at a decapitation strike against the Yemeni leadership while Sayyed Abdulmalik Al-Houthi was delivering a speech.

The targets included power stations and the presidential palace in Sana’a, where Yemeni Prime Minister Ahmad al-Rahawi and 12 other senior officials were assassinated, as confirmed by the government two days later.

Yet this was just another of Israel’s pyrrhic victories. The slain men were not military commanders or battlefield strategists, but administrators and senior government officials.

As state officials, they conducted their work openly in a well-known location, further underscoring the Zionist entity’s inability to penetrate Ansarallah’s high-level military and defense structures.

The assassinations took place during a moment of acute weakness for Israel, which has been battered by the Palestinian resistance’s regular ambushes in north Gaza and Gaza City, the capture of four more regime soldiers, and the failure of its planned “invasion” – all while struggling to prevent or thwart Yemen’s precision strikes on its airports and ports.

In response, the cowardly Israeli premier ordered more acts of aggression against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, targeting residential areas, refugee camps and hospitals housing the displaced.

Murdering diplomatic officials is hardly a new tactic for the Tel Aviv regime. The Israelis and Americans have merely recycled worn-out Saudi playbooks and exhausted their target banks.

On April 19, 2018, Salah al-Sammad, Yemen’s former president, was assassinated in a Saudi airstrike on Hodeidah. Around the same time, the Saudi proxy coalition was imposing a siege on the same port city, triggering a devastating famine and cholera epidemic.

Yet, both the assassination and the siege proved to be turning points in the imposed war. Nearly a year later, the coalition’s Hodeidah offensive collapsed into a decisive Ansarallah victory, achieved by a movement that singlehandedly repelled the most heavily armed and lavishly funded U-backed forces.

The attempt to choke off Hodeidah backfired. While the coalition failed to deliver a physical death blow to the Yemeni resistance movement, it sought instead to impose a political death on the movement that had assumed state power in 2014.

Al-Aqsa Flood and Ansarallah movement

For years, Yemen’s government was dismissed as “Houthi rebels” and systematically delegitimized in popular political discourse in the West and the Arab world.

Yet one of the outcomes of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood has been a shift in that perception: Ansarallah is now widely recognized as the rightful and sole ruling entity of Yemen.

The revolutionary government’s popularity is reflected in the millions who pour into the streets for weekly rallies in solidarity with Palestine.

In the post-October 7 era, Ansarallah has demonstrated both a firm command of sovereign decision-making and an unmatched capacity for mass mobilization.

As one of the few regional forces to take concrete action in defense of Gaza, its blockade of Israeli-linked shipping has been remarkably successful, as Israel relies on the sea for 98 percent of its trade, and a severe strain on the US Navy as well.

Despite the proxy regime’s hollow appeals to a meaningless label of “international UN recognition,” it has been the Ansarallah-led government alone that upheld the international law, enshrined mandate to resist genocide, most visibly through its maritime operations against Israeli-linked ships.

Yet, as Martyr Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah of Lebanon’s Hezbollah resistance movement once observed, Gaza itself proves that international law cannot protect anyone: “If you are weak, the world will not acknowledge you, protect you, or even cry for you. What protects you is your weapons, your power!”

Ansarallah’s operations have succeeded in undermining the US Navy, grinding the genocidal Zionist entity’s economy to a halt, an economy of which 98 percent depends on maritime trade, and further cementing Ansarallah’s political legitimacy.

In acting to prevent genocide, it has not only mobilized immense popular support but also wielded military capabilities that far exceed its seemingly modest resources. The movement’s maritime victories, coupled with its routine ballistic missile strikes that have devastated the Zionist economy, demonstrate its monopoly over force and deterrence as Yemen’s sole legitimate authority.

Contrast these achievements, emerging from the poorest country in the Arab world, with the impotence of the so-called “internationally recognized” government. Its self-proclaimed “deputy foreign minister,” Mostafa Noman, was reduced to begging Washington for “more support” to incite “regime change,” even as Ansarallah, through decisive means, was altering the course of history and the global economy.

History of Yemeni resistance

After the collapse of the Cold War-divided Yemen, Washington quickly set its sights on shaping the country to serve its regional ambitions. The so-called “reunification” of Yemen coincided with the solidification of American influence over its leadership.

Ali Abdallah Saleh, the new president, became a willing client, faithfully following Washington’s dictates. In 2004, he returned from a US visit with arms and orders to assassinate Hussein Badr al-Din al-Houthi.

Al-Houthi became the figure who charted the template for a sovereign Yemen, rooted in genuine Islamic principles rather than the Western logic of capital.

The Ansarallah movement carried forward this legacy, applying the long-standing Zaidi and more broadly Shi’a principle of revolt against unjust leadership. By rooting their struggle in this indigenous and historical framework, they transformed it into a modern resistance project.

Pre-revolution Yemen was marked by widespread poverty, while comprador elites and American agents siphoned off the nation’s wealth. The country was reduced to a subordinate appendage of the US-backed Arab oil economy, leaving farmers and workers impoverished by import dependency, neglect of agriculture, and the suppression of domestic industry.

At the same time, Al-Qaeda and ISIS (Daesh) operated freely within Yemen, with the country serving as a hub of US-sponsored “terrorism,”a pretext Washington used to justify its control, as Sayyed Hussein Badr al-Din al-Houthi often emphasized in his lectures and writings.

Hussein al-Houthi was among the first to clearly articulate US ambitions in Yemen. Leading the only movement in the country with a truly sovereign vision, he called for active resistance against foreign domination. He identified Al-Qaeda, despite its sprawling presence in Yemen, as an American intelligence asset, and described the September 11 attacks as a US inside job.

Though more a spiritual personality than a career politician, al-Houthi’s exemplary and inspiring leadership embodied the hallmarks of political legitimacy: the consent and approval of the governed, and the accountability of leadership to its people.

By contrast, Ansarallah’s rivals in Yemen – whether the UAE-backed STC, the so-called “internationally recognized” government, the Muslim Brotherhood-aligned Al-Islah Party, or even the pre-1991 communist regime in South Yemen – were all products of foreign influence and mechanisms of external control, designed to keep Sana’a within their orbit.

Ansarallah, however, grew organically out of the Believing Youth (al-Shabab al-Mu’minin) movement of the 1990s. Its political power was not manufactured in foreign capitals but rooted in truth, history, and the grassroots movement.

Analysts have noted that Ansarallah’s rise to prominence was shaped by its ability to navigate the social and political dynamics of Yemen’s tribal culture, an achievement few other political groups could claim. This was not simply a tactical maneuver, but a reflection of the movement’s deep cohesion with its people.

In addition to his renowned mobilization skills and ability to engage the mountainous tribes of Yemen, Sayyed Badr al-Din demonstrated his movement’s legitimacy by winning a parliamentary seat in the 1993 elections. Unlike the offices of many of his rivals, bought and secured with external backing, his mandate came from his honorable reputation, his scholarship, and the trust of his people.

Legitimacy and people’s consent

Yemen’s current revolutionary government and leadership, unlike the many puppet regimes that preceded and contested them, emerged from a rejection of US-Arab domination over the country, its economy, and its resources.

Defined by both moral and political opposition to corruption in all its forms, the first seeds of revolt were planted in Sana’a during the post-Arab Spring protests, when demonstrators rose up against IMF-imposed fuel taxes and austerity measures that devastated the nation.

While the Muslim Brotherhood-aligned Islah Party gained some traction in the aftermath of 2011, the struggle over leadership ultimately gave way to the 2014 revolution, restoring Yemen’s sovereignty for the first time in modern history.

Even militarily, Ansarallah’s government drew on little more than decades-old stockpiles, gradually developing its own weapons domestically. This self-reliance was tested and proven in the fight against the US.-backed, Saudi-led coalition that launched its siege in 2015.

But Yemen’s sovereignty extended beyond weapons. In 2018, former President Saleh al-Sammad introduced the National Vision for Building the Modern State of Yemen, a comprehensive plan immediately adopted by the Supreme Political Council.

Unlike the UN’s “Vision 2030,” Yemen’s national vision was an authentically sovereign and forward-looking framework, anchored in independence, resilience, and the will of the country’s people.

Opponents of Yemen’s revolutionary government often claim that 70 percent of the country’s territory lies under the control of the UAE-backed STC. In reality, most of that territory is desert, its “constituents” little more than grains of sand.

Ansarallah, which runs the country’s legitimate government, holds sovereign control over roughly 80 percent of the population and the country’s major urban centers, clear evidence of its rule by the consent of the people.

Throughout its history, Yemen was plagued by national disunity and deep tribal factionalism, obstacles that long prevented the formation of a strong and sovereign state. That Ansarallah has not only risen to power but continues to govern over the majority of the population after years of protracted war and siege by an international coalition of foreign capital is a testament to its natural legitimacy.

Just as the martyrdom of President Saleh al-Sammad marked a turning point during the Saudi-led siege of Yemen after 2015, the martyrdom of Prime Minister al-Rahawi and 12 ministers and advisors will likewise herald a new turning point, this time in the downfall of the Zionist entity.

Yemen’s latest operations, undeterred during or after the assassinations, represent only the opening stage of escalation, an escalation that will surely seal the Zionist entity’s crumbling fate.

Source: Press TV