Israel's defense establishment in shock by Houthi Tel Aviv drone attack - analysis

On Friday morning, the defense establishment was in a state of shock.

Though the writing was on the wall, no one saw this coming from a thousand miles away.

That is despite the fact that Hezbollah has managed to successfully strike Israel dozens of times with drones without being detected.

The Houthis and an Iranian militia from Iraq, using drones, have successfully hit parts of Eilat, including a naval base, from late 2023 to mid-2024 without being detected.

Israel has essentially outsourced its defense responses regarding the Houthis to the US.

Only pre-October 7 thinking would have missed the possibility that the Houthis might attack other parts of Israel with drones.

And now one Israeli is dead and around a dozen wounded  – in the heart of Tel Aviv.

No sense of immediacy

Israel has been moving in slow motion when attempting to improve its capability of shooting down low-flying drones, which can outwit Israeli radar, anti-air batteries, and aircraft much better than ballistic rockets.

Until now, there has been no sense of urgency, despite the fact that either Hezbollah, the Houthis, an Iraqi militia, or Iran itself could use a drone at any time to attack just about any target in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem.

Like the Hamas tunnel threat that was ignored until it was utilized to kill and wound Israelis in 2014, this threat has been given scant attention because there were so many larger threats  – and since Israel has done, by and large, a great job shooting down Houthi threats to Eilat up until now.

Notably, Israel and the US, together with European and Arab allies, did a phenomenal job shooting down the Iranian drone threats in April.

But the April attack was extremely forecasted, and only defending Eilat had mattered in this regard – that is, as long as the enemy stuck to the same pattern and did not patiently probe a part of Israel that the IDF was not constantly protecting.

It is an October 6 mentality to anticipate predictable and recurring attacks alone, as opposed to trying to predict where Israel’s many enemies might find a soft underbelly instead.

The scary thing is not that the Houthis snuck one drone through to Tel Aviv.

The scary thing is that this incident stunned the defense establishment, and they are nowhere nearer to a plan to protect Israel’s citizens from such an eventuality in the future.