An Israeli airstrike killed the prime minister of the Houthi rebel-controlled government in Yemen’s capital, Sana’a, the Houthis have said.
Ahmed al-Rahawi was killed in a strike in Sana’a on Thursday along with a number of ministers, the rebels said in a statement on Saturday. Other ministers and officials were wounded, the statement added without providing further details.
The head of the group’s supreme political council, Mahdi al-Mashat, said: “We promise to God, to the dear Yemeni people and the families of the martyrs and wounded that we will take revenge.”
He warned foreign companies to leave Israel “before it’s too late”.
The premier was targeted along with other members of his Houthi-controlled government during a “routine workshop held by the government to evaluate its activities and performance over the past year”, the Houthi statement said.
Thursday’s Israeli strike took place as the rebel-owned television station was broadcasting a speech by Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, the secretive leader of the rebel group, in which he was sharing updates on the latest Gaza developments and vowing retaliation against Israel. Senior Houthi officials used to gather to watch al-Houthi’s prerecorded speeches.
The strike that killed the prime minister targeted a meeting for Houthi leaders in a villa in Beit Baws, an ancient village in southern Sana’a, three tribal leaders told the Associated Press. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they feared repercussions.
On Thursday, the Israeli military said that it “precisely struck a Houthi terrorist regime military target in the area of Sana’a in Yemen”. The military had no immediate comment on Saturday’s announcement of the prime minister’s killing.
“Yemen endures a lot for the victory of the Palestinian people,” al-Rahawi said after an Israeli strike last week on an oil facility owned by the country’s main oil company, which is controlled by the rebels in Sana’a, as well as a power plant.
On 22 August the Houthis had launched a ballistic missile toward Israel that its military described as the first cluster bomb the rebels had launched at it since 2023.
The prime minister hailed from the southern province of Abyan, and was an ally to the former Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh. He allied himself with the Houthis when the rebels overran Sana’a and much of the north and centre of the country in 2014, initiating the country’s long-running civil war. He was appointed as prime minister in August 2024.
Al-Rahawi is the most senior Houthi official to be killed since the US and Israel began their air and naval campaign in response to the rebels’ missile and drone attacks on Israel and on ships in the Red Sea. The US and Israeli strikes killed dozens of people. One US strike in April hit a prison holding African migrants in the northern Sadaa province, killing at least 68 people and wounding 47 others.
Ahmed Nagi, a senior Yemen analyst with the Crisis Group International, a Brussels-based thinktank, called the killing of the Houthi prime minister a “serious setback” for the rebels.
He said the escalation marks an Israeli shift from striking the rebels’ infrastructure to targeting their leaders, including senior military figures, which “poses a greater threat to their command structure”.
The Houthis launched a campaign targeting ships in response to the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip, saying they were doing so in solidarity with the Palestinians. Their attacks over the past two years have upended shipping in the Red Sea, through which about $1tn of goods pass each year.
In May, the Trump administration announced a deal with the Houthis to end the airstrikes in return for an end to attacks on shipping. The rebels, however, said the agreement did not include halting attacks on targets it believed were aligned with Israel.
