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Yemen and ‘the Houthis’: Challenging Sami Hamdi’s Narrative

By Robert Inlakesh | Palestine Chronicle | October 23, 2026 

Amidst widespread confusion about the Saudi-Yemen War, British journalist Sami Hamdi has weighed in on the debate. Unfortunately, his stance and analysis not only miss the mark, but are replete with factual errors, undemonstrable assumptions, and an incorrect timeline of how events transpired.

Until recently, the war in Yemen has long been ignored by the corporate media in the West. Despite the conflict being over a decade old, most references to it highlighted a humanitarian crisis and presented a narrative that a Saudi-Iranian proxy war was raging on. “The Houthis” have been labeled as terrorists, and many have found it rather difficult to understand what is truly going on inside the country.

Therefore, the goal of this article is to push back against Sami Hamdi’s portrayal of events inside the country and provide key context that will help a wider audience understand this issue in greater depth. It is not an attack on Hamdi himself, or an attempt to discredit him as a journalist; instead, it is a criticism of his narrative on this issue and a correction of false information he has presented.

The “Both Sides” Argument

Note: Sami Hamdi refuses to call Ansarallah by the actual adopted name of their movement and instead uses the label “Houthis”, which is considered derogatory and tribalistic by their supporters inside Yemen. To be clear, “the Houthis” is used interchangeably with Ansarallah.

The crux of Hamdi’s argument rests upon the narrative that both sides in the war are in the wrong, presenting his analysis as coming from a somewhat neutral stance. He also draws a moral equivalency between the ills of “the Houthis”, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. In this regard, he has argued that “the Saudis and the Houthis agree that Yemenis should not have the right to choose their leader”, going a step further to even posit that “the Saudis and Houthis believe that Yemen should not belong to Yemenis”.

To begin with, Ansarallah are a Yemeni movement composed entirely of Yemenis, publicly arguing that their war effort is to return Yemen to its people. Therefore, the concept that they don’t believe that Yemen should belong to Yemenis themselves makes little sense. The argument he employs additionally tries to separate Ansarallah from the Yemeni people, framing the issue as if they are a kind of foreign occupier.

In order to justify this claim, Hamdi argues that “the Houthis” imposed themselves on the country and do not even represent any authentic will of the Yemeni people. This not only attempts to relegate the Houthi family themselves, but also the millions of followers of the Ansarallah movement and its supporters, which represent a large portion of the nation’s populace.

A moral equivalency argument also does not work here. Ansarallah is an indigenous Yemeni movement that runs a government out of the nation’s Capital City and rules over the majority of the nation’s population. Saudi Arabia is a foreign country that has imposed a blockade on Yemen’s people for over a decade. The land, naval, and aerial siege manufactured a man-made famine that wiped out hundreds of thousands of people, while collectively punishing over 26 million others and depriving them of basic necessities.

Despite warnings from the United Nations and footage streaming out of the country, clearly showing the impacts on civilians, with children being disproportionately impacted, the Saudis continued their blockade.

The lower estimates for how many Yemeni civilians have been killed by Saudi airstrikes are around 9,000, while the higher figures often presented by the Ansarallah-led government are closer to 20,000. These attacks have included strikes on mosques, hospitals, schools, funerals and weddings.

The Royal Saudi Air Force (RSAF) would conduct routine massacres, such as bombing a packed school bus on August 9, 2018, killing 51 civilians, including at least 40 children. In October of 2016, a funeral was held for the father of Yemen’s Interior Minister, which drew a number of officials from the Ansarallah movement. The Saudi air force bombed the funeral before launching a double-tap strike that targeted the first responders – 155 were killed and 525 others were injured; the vast majority of whom were civilians.

Riyadh systematically destroyed Yemen’s energy and fuel infrastructure, in addition to its transportation sector. It bombed Yemeni airports at least 227 times, struck countless food storage facilities, and indiscriminately bombarded commercial and public facilities. Nothing was off limits. This was also a war of choice, not of necessity. It asserted itself over Yemen and its decision-making since 2011, in an attempt to dictate who would rule the country, still refusing to lift its blockade after more than a decade of suffering inside the country.

Ansarallah are, factually speaking, a Yemeni movement; Saudi Arabia is a foreign country. As for Iran’s support for them, the Iranians are not responsible for launching a direct attack, imposing a blockade, carrying out civilian massacres, or dictating the post-revolutionary process like Saudi Arabia. No political Party or armed group inside Yemen is without any foreign backers or support from abroad.

Factually Inaccurate Framing Of History

Hamdi sets the stage for his analysis of the Saudi-Yemen War by falsely claiming “the Houthis had just lost their sixth attempt to take over Yemen”. In his narrative, the Ansarallah movement is a rebel faction attempting to impose a tribalistic theocracy on the entire country through a series of wars. According to this logic, the only reason they were not able to achieve this in the past was because of their weakness and because they were blockaded in the northern Sa’ada Province by the Yemeni State.

The six conflicts, taking place between 2004 and 2010, were never in any way attempts to take over Yemen, the Ansarallah movement was not fighting with this as a justification for their armed action against the State, nor does any authoritative source argue this. Either Hamdi is mistaken and should retract this claim, or he is deliberately spreading false information to bolster his narrative.

The movement that calls itself Ansarallah today began forming in the 1990s and was led by a Zaydi Shia scholar, Hussein al-Houthi.

In 1992, members of the Houthi family in the northern Sa’ada Province founded Al-Shabab al-Mu’minoun (The Believing Youth) movement. Their goal was to revive the Zaydi sect of Shia Islam, which they believed was being slowly lost, compromised and directly threatened. To achieve their goals of reviving their religious teachings, they began starting summer schools and cultural clubs.

Hussein al-Houthi, the movement’s founding leader, would go on to participate in Yemeni politics in the mid-1990s, getting elected to parliament on behalf of the al-Haqq Party. He offered scathing critiques of State corruption and mismanagement, while condemning Saudi Arabia, Israel and the United States. As a leader of the movement, his platform was built upon anti-imperialism and pan-Islamic unity, teaching that this strategy was the most effective means of defeating the US and Israel.

This kind of anti-imperialist rhetoric was initially tolerated by Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who was himself of a Zaydi-Shia background. President Saleh had initially sided with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein during his invasion of Kuwait in 1990. In retaliation for Saleh’s stance in support of the Iraqi President during the Gulf War, Saudi Arabia expelled around a million Yemeni workers and Yemen grew increasingly isolated.

Then came the US’s so-called ‘War on Terror’ in the early 2000s, when President Saleh decided to switch sides and back the United States, also growing closer to Saudi Arabia. Hussein al-Houthi was causing immense embarrassment to the nation’s dictator. The Believing Youth movement would chant anti-US and anti-Israel slogans in their mosques, while advocating against Washington’s wars in the Muslim World.

In 2004, President Saleh decided to launch a military raid, aimed at arresting Hussein al-Houthi, but it was resisted by members of the movement. The conflict ended with the killing of the Zaydi leader. Although Saleh believed this would be the end of the movement, they had transformed Hussein al-Houthi into a martyr, and his forces achieved the very opposite of crushing the movement. Not a single one of the battles between the rebels in Sa’ada and the Yemeni Army was about who would rule Yemen; they were localized and had nothing to do with an attempt to impose their rule over the entire country.

In fact, President Saleh made a number of requests that the United States intervene in order to help crush the rebels, attempting to argue that they were receiving support from Iran. The US assessed that there was no such evidence that they were being armed by the Iranians, therefore treating the issue as a local problem. Instead, the Americans discovered that the weapons being used against Saleh’s forces were primarily coming from his own army.

The Ansarallah movement never aimed to take over Yemen through these conflicts; it was simply not even on the cards for them to think further than the north at that point. There are no public statements from them that indicate that any of these wars were fought over a divine right of the Houthi family to rule Yemen; this notion is simply false.

“The Houthi” Takeover and the “Internationally Recognized Government”

When Hamdi was recently interviewed on ‘The Thinking Muslim’ program, he made a number of assertions about the Ansarallah takeover of Yemen’s Capital, Sana’a – misrepresenting the series of events that led to this outcome.

He begins the timeline with the overthrow of longtime Dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh, then claims that the Yemenis “get together and decide to host a national dialogue”.

“So a national dialogue begins under the auspices of the United Nations. Everybody engages with it and the Qataris insist that the Houthis should also take part in it as well.” Hamdi continues:

“They come to an agreement that the country will be ruled through democratic elections; there will be an interim government; a southerner will be put as President (Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi) in order to ease the southern separatist tendencies. There will be an election where this President will run on his own, so he will have a democratic mandate; then there will be widespread elections, and Yemenis will choose who should rule over them.”

This timeline is totally incorrect. In 2011, the Yemeni people initiated an uprising against President Ali Abdullah Saleh, which ended when the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) drafted an arrangement whereby the dictator would step down and make way for a new leadership in 2012.

The Yemeni national dialogue, as described by Hamdi, did not take place during this period. Instead, the Saudis and their GCC allies decided that the Yemeni Dictator’s Vice President would be installed in power as part of the agreement to allow for a transition of power. An election was held, in which then Vice President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi was the only candidate on the ballot. The election was widely rejected by a range of Yemeni political parties.

Then came the 2013-2014 National Dialogue Conference (NDC) period, which was brokered by the Saudis and their GCC allies. It was endorsed and supervised by the United Nations on the ground, but it was not a UN initiative as Hamdi’s framing suggests.

President Hadi would be granted a two-year mandate to rule as the interim President. This mandate was then extended by a year, which did not come about by any democratic consensus of the Yemeni people.

Although his timeline is incorrect, it is true that Ansarallah participated in the National Dialogue, yet he leaves out key details as to why they decided to take measures into their own hands. In March of 2013, the dialogue began. By November, a member of the Ansarallah delegation had already been assassinated. On January 21, 2014, another member of their delegation was also assassinated, prompting Ansarallah to withdraw from the process and take over the Capital, alongside allied forces. President Hadi then resigned, before escaping and rescinding his announcement.

Another claim that Sami Hamdi makes is that Ansarallah simply toppled the “Internationally Recognized Government” of Yemen in Sana’a, with the process occurring as follows:

“They literally walk into the city and say: ‘This national dialogue that you guys have, this idea Yemenis decide who should rule, is Haram (A sin), we do not accept it. Abdul Malik al-Houthi, a descendant of the Prophet Mohammed, is the only one entitled to rule in this country’.”

Simply put, this is utter nonsense. There are no such statements that exist to suggest that this was their reasoning; Ansarallah have never publicly argued this position and did not use this reasoning to justify their takeover of the Capital at the time.

He then goes on to offer another invention:

“The Americans, Obama, who is negotiating his nuclear deal with the Iranians, doesn’t want to provoke Tehran; he doesn’t react to the Houthis taking Sana’a; instead, John Kerry comes out and says these Houthis can be reliable allies against Al-Qaeda.”

No such statement exists from John Kerry, who was US Secretary of State in 2015 when Ansarallah took over. In fact, the US reaction was the very opposite of what Hamdi describes. The takeover happened in February, which triggered fierce US condemnation and statements in support of the exiled President Hadi.

Within a month, the Obama administration had already greenlit the Saudi war against Yemen, with the goal of regime change, providing weapons and logistical support to the Saudi-led coalition. Washington also decided to permit the inhumane blockade on Yemen, deploying its own naval armada to help enforce that blockade. In April of 2015, the U.S. also backed United Nations Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 2216 that demanded Ansarallah withdraw from the territories they had captured. It wasn’t until 2016 that John Kerry would actually initiate his ‘Yemen Peace Plan’, which ultimately failed.

To address another of Hamdi’s points, he directly states that the US did not want to take a firm stance against the Houthis because it was negotiating its nuclear deal with Iran. This is also false; the American stance was not only anti-Ansarallah, but it also endorsed and supported Saudi military action. The Iran Nuclear Deal was signed in July of 2015; in April of that year, John Kerry said the following:

“There are obviously supplies that have been coming from Iran. There are a number of flights every single week that have been flying in and we trace those flights and we know those… The United States is not going to stand by while the region is destabilized.”

There is no evidence to support the claim that the US didn’t act because it sought to appease Iran. The opposite is true; they openly threatened the Iranians and took a firm stance, including military action.

When it comes to what is referred to as the “internationally recognized government” of Yemen, between 2015 and 2022, this was the deposed President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi, who fled to Riyadh, in Saudi Arabia. He long outstayed his mandate, in an election designed by the GCC States and in which he was the only candidate.

Then in 2022, the Saudis decided to remove Hadi and establish a Yemeni Presidential Leadership Council (PLC). The PLC was formed in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Riyadh, and all its leaders were both selected by the Saudis and live there too. It has no “democratic mandate,” and nobody even knows where the deposed leader Hadi is today. Not exactly a sovereign government.

“The Houthis” Alleged Tribalistic-Theological Belief in Running Yemen

Sami Hamdi elaborates on his point about Ansarallah not wanting Yemeni self-determination in a number of interviews, then going on to argue that “the Houthis” believe that their current leader Abdul-Malik al-Houthi is divinely ordained to rule over Yemen. This argument demonstrates a lack of any depth or understanding of the dynamics inside the country, and fails to take into consideration the track record of the movement, which has never promoted such a platform.

The current leader of Ansarallah and his predecessor, who ran the Zaydi revivalist movement that laid the foundations for what exists today, never advocated that they are divinely ordained to run Yemen. There is no statement that indicates this is the movement’s platform or assertions by its leadership that they have such intentions. Neither Hussein al-Houthi nor the current leader, Abdul Malik al-Houthi, have mentioned the concept as a goal.

However, the argument about the divine right to rule as descendants of the Prophet Mohammed’s family is a real belief. Yemen’s northern tribes have also experienced rivalries because of this concept within Zaydi Shiism. Amongst the tribes, there are those who are considered Qahtani and those who are Adnani. Qahtanis are those tribes who descend from the local population of the country, while Adnanis are those who originate from the north (modern-day Saudi Arabia). The Houthis are Adnani.

One major hurdle that Ansarallah has had to tackle in ruling the country is tribalism, which they have managed to find great success in combating and have gone to great lengths to mend ties with historically opposing tribes. In fact, the Ansarallah movement has managed to dismantle some of the traditional tribal power structures – such as parts of the Hashid and Bakil confederations – to achieve peace amongst tribes.

In 2019, Ansarallah released a document entitled the “National Vision for the Modern Yemeni State,” in which they advocated a democratic approach. They also allow for a parliament and government, composed of multiple parties, to run the nation’s affairs out of the Capital City, Sana’a.

It is true that the Zaydi faith teaches that only descendants of the Ahlul Bayt (Prophet Mohammed’s family) have the right to rule; it is also true that Abdul Malik al-Houthi remains the Ansarallah leader. Yet, arguing that this is what the movement is openly advocating inside the country is off the mark. It removes potential for elements of growth and what the Ansarallah public platform actually is, in addition to ignoring facts on the ground from the overall equation.

Their public platform in Yemen is not sectarian; it is actually advocating pan-Islamic Unity, and it has even taken up the banner of endorsing a democratic system publicly, arguing that the nation cannot be run by foreign influences. Its government is in many ways more representative and certainly more democratic than the surrounding hereditary monarchies surrounding it.

It is important to note that it would be totally inaccurate to describe the Ansarallah-led government in Sana’a as fully democratic; that is not what is being argued. There are advisors from the Ansarallah movement who are present at each level of the government and advocating the overthrow of the system is evidently not tolerated. However, it is a nation under siege, one whose infrastructure has been crippled by over a decade of war and has no access to the outside world, beyond support and recognition provided by their allies in Tehran. Like Hamas in Gaza, they have never been given a chance to properly govern.

If the argument is that Ansarallah has no right to govern based upon their current predicament, then the leaderships in Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and across the region should also be considered non-States and illegitimate. The criteria here simply makes no sense, especially given that the people whom the Ansarallah movement rules over have not revolted against them. Bear in mind here that the population they currently govern has for long been roughly a 50-50 split between Sunni and Shia. With the takeover of Taiz City, the Shia will actually be a minority.

One of the main reasons why “the Houthis” is viewed as a derogatory term, as opposed to using Ansarallah to describe a much broader movement that does not just consist of one family, is that the term is deliberately designed to encourage tribalism and sectarianism. In addition to this, it is simply no longer an accurate term to call them “the Houthis” or describe them as “rebels” either.

Another assertion made by Hamdi is that “they (Ansarallah) have shifted dramatically to the Twelver Shia sect”. Not only is this claim baseless, but if it were to be true, then it would completely defeat his argument regarding their alleged belief in a divine right to rule. This is because Twelver Shias do not share the Zaydi belief that only descendants of the Prophet Mohammed have the exclusive right to rule.

Ansarallah are known to be adherents to the Jaroudi School of thought, which is widely regarded as the strictest Zaydi branch. While other Zaydi schools of thought were accused of shifting their positions in order to appease the Republicans in North Yemen – after the fall of the Mutawakkilite Kingdom in 1970 – this school of thought resisted. In fact, the reason why Ansarallah exists today is because of a movement to revive the Zaydi sect.

This is also a conspiracy theory often promoted by Saudi-backed opponents of Ansarallah, who find it difficult to make extreme religious rulings against Zaydi Shiism. This is because the Zaydi branch of Shiism is much closer to Sunni Islam than Twelver Shiism (the sect that currently runs Iran). By claiming that they are no longer even Zaydis, it makes discriminatory sectarian arguments appear more logical. Above all, it lays the foundation for the argument that “the Houthis” are a proxy of the Islamic Republic of Iran and that they have no real agency beyond a greedy family desire to rule.

As a point of history, Hussein al-Houthi was vocally critical of the Twelver Shia doctrine and offered various critiques of the Islamic Republic. This clearly didn’t come out of a place of animosity toward Iran, but from theological disagreements, which is demonstrated through the public admiration of the Islamic Revolution in Iran and its stances against both Zionism and US imperialism.

If Sami Hamdi were making the argument that it is his personal belief that Ansarallah are lying in their public platform, then that would be a different matter. Yet, that is not what he is out there arguing; he jumbles up the timeline of events, attaches positions to the Ansarallah movement that are not those that it advocates, while seemingly inventing things that simply never happened. At best, it is a complete misunderstanding of reality; at worst, it is a completely dishonest approach.

It appears from his narrative that Sami Hamdi shares the Muslim Brotherhood perspective on Yemen. The Party connected to the Muslim Brotherhood there is called al-Islah and it is aligned with Saudi Arabia. Its leadership is also based in Riyadh. In addition to this, the Party that once had enormous influence and a large youth base inside the country, especially in the Taiz area, has since lost much of its support. It has become a hollowed-out shell of the former Party it was and is now working as an agent of Saudi Arabia, while having previously sought to only align itself strategically with them.

From a pro-Muslim Brotherhood perspective, al-Islah has failed and Saudi Arabia is in large part responsible for this. If Sami Hamdi’s intentions are to argue this stance, then his position makes perfect sense here. Because there is no longer any hope for the Muslim Brotherhood to take over and it has lost its ability to operate independently of its Saudi backers.

Preempting Potential Death Toll Arguments

Unlike the statistics for victims of targeted Saudi airstrikes, there is no comprehensive breakdown of civilian casualties caused by all sides on the ground in Yemen; claims from rights groups that are partisan to either side have published a range of claims, none of which have been independently substantiated.

Independent inquiries conducted by United Nations experts and leading international Rights Groups accuse all sides on the ground of inflicting civilian casualties and a litany of human rights abuses. The most comprehensive investigation was a 41-page report published by the UN Human Rights Council that documented acts of violence between 2014 and 2018.

If we look strictly to the international Human Rights Groups and the United Nations, their conclusions appear to maintain that thousands of civilians have been killed by all sides throughout a large number of battles, and tens of thousands of others were injured. However, all agree that when it comes to the category of who committed the most direct civilian deaths, it is the Saudi-led coalition – and this is not including those who died as a result of the blockade.

As an example of the kinds of unreliable figures produced in order to influence public opinion and claim that Ansarallah are responsible for the most civilian deaths, take the example of ‘The Yemeni Network for Rights and Freedoms’. Although presenting itself as if it is an independent rights group, it works in favor of the Saudi-backed Presidential Leadership Council (PLC)’s narratives and publishes reports that exclusively list alleged crimes committed by “the Houthis” but provide no figures on crimes committed by the Saudi-backed forces.

It also refuses to disclose its funders publicly, claims to be based out of Sana’a in Yemen on its website – which it isn’t – and has praised Saudi Arabia as the “sole guardian of the international resolutions that stipulate the protection of civilians in Yemen”.

In every warzone on earth, especially when fighting takes place in urban areas, it is a guarantee that all sides will inevitably end up killing civilians. However, the war of choice, launched by Saudi Arabia and its allies, cannot automatically be compared to the moral standing of the various factions inside Yemen itself.

Riyadh is in a league of its own when it comes to civilian deaths in Yemen. Nearly 400,000 civilians are estimated to have died due to the war, with most of these deaths being attributed to the results of the Saudi-imposed blockade, which continues to be imposed on the country. It deliberately manufactured a famine. Due to the blockade, between April 2015 and October 2018 alone, 85,000 children under the age of 5 died due to starvation and preventable illnesses, according to Save the Children.

If we want to look at the Saudi-backed forces on the ground, they have openly accepted the help of Al-Qaeda against Ansarallah, a fact that even shocked BBC journalist Nawal Al-Maghafi in 2016, when she was covering a battle taking place in the Taiz province.

The UAE was also exposed for having recruited a large number of former Al-Qaeda fighters into its own “counter-terrorism” and “security forces” that it backed inside Yemen; the Southern Transitional Council (STC) being the biggest faction it supported. The main officer core of the Southern Giants Brigades militia, which fights on the side of the Saudi-backed PLC, is composed of former Al-Qaeda and Daesh fighters.

It suffices to say that the moral equivalency argument doesn’t work; it rings a very similar tone to the arguments employed against Hamas in Gaza: “Israel did bad things but”. Interestingly, when we look at the corporate media coverage of the conflict in Yemen, there is more than one similarity to the reporting on Palestine. For example, we hear about claims from a “Houthi-run Yemeni Health Ministry”, just as we hear about a “Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry”.

History also always begins whenever those the media favor start the clock, like when Riyadh’s King Khalid Airport was attacked with a ballistic missile, ignoring hundreds of strikes on Yemeni Airports. Or that Saudi Arabia began its attack on Yemen on March 26, 2015, by committing a civilian massacre at Sana’a International Airport, or that it broke the Yemen ceasefire by bombing that same airport earlier this July.

Conclusion

Intentions aside, Sami Hamdi’s argument works to achieve the same goal as those who argue that there is a moral equivalency between Hamas and Israel. Through this lens, both are guilty and neither side should be considered different from the other; instead, the focus is diverted away from culpability. Both sides are bad; history can be twisted in any way we choose; therefore, there is no stance that can be taken on the issue.

Using his logic, it should not come into consideration that Israel is openly backing Saudi Arabia’s war effort, even providing it with direct targeting data. Meaning that US-manufactured fighter jets are being used by Saudi pilots who pull the trigger on targets chosen by the same Israeli military that chooses targets across Gaza.

In the case of Yemen, Hamdi’s obfuscation shrouds the issue in ambiguity, presenting the war as too complex for the average person to understand. “The Houthis” are an evil foreign Iranian proxy that believes in a Zaydi concept of a divine right to rule, while simultaneously being Twelver Shia’s (who don’t believe this).

Just as Israeli propagandists have historically sought to depict the Palestine issue as too complex to understand, only to inject misleading propaganda into their “both sides” arguments, the Yemen propaganda works upon the same premise. The timeline is always inaccurate, there are countless unsubstantiated claims, and then there is always an accusation that if you identify an aggressor, you don’t care about the blood of the innocents.

The Ansarallah-led Yemeni Armed Forces are the only Arab government that fought Israel in response to the Gaza genocide. They sacrificed ongoing negotiations that could have helped them achieve economic relief in 2023 by deciding to open fire on Israel and to impose a blockade on Israeli Ports. Various Palestinian resistance factions, their fighters and leadership, openly praised and thanked Ansarallah for what they did. Meanwhile, the rest of the Arab governments were either complicit in the Gaza genocide or simply watched on, only offering occasional condemnatory statements.

While Sami Hamdi argues about the Yemeni people, not specifically articulating which Yemenis or Parties he is talking about, there are actually two sides that are fighting in Yemen:

One is backed by Israel and the United States. The other is fighting against Israel and has directly engaged both in battle. It is Saudi Arabia versus Ansarallah in this war. If Riyadh were to win, that means that Israel and the United States would win. These are the broader implications of what is going on and would mean that no Arab government supporting Palestine would be left standing.

Arguing a critique of Ansarallah does not justify Saudi Arabia’s attack on Yemen with US-Israeli backing. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was not exactly an angel; he stood accused of killing hundreds of thousands of his own people. Just because the former Iraqi leader committed crimes did not justify the US invasion and toppling of his government.

The same argument that Sami Hamdi uses in Yemen was deployed to explain away the invasion of Iraq in 2003. It is a regime change war argument. People are able to acknowledge that Saddam Hussein committed various crimes, but still opposed the foreign war and understood that it was waged against Iraq, not just the Iraqi Ba’ath Party. In the early 2000s, there were also people who claimed that those discussing Israel’s role in promoting regime change, and the broader regional repercussions, believed that “Iraqi blood is cheap”.

Whether someone decides to support the Ansarallah as a movement, believing they should be the rulers of Yemen when the foreign-imposed war is over, is another question entirely. This question is also for the Yemeni people to answer internally and should not be dictated by Saudi Arabia or any outside power.

– Robert Inlakesh is a journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. He focuses on the Middle East, specializing in Palestine.

October 23, 2026 Posted by aletho | Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Zionism | Comments Off on Yemen and ‘the Houthis’: Challenging Sami Hamdi’s Narrative