It appears that Hamas has chosen the date of its ongoing invasion of Israel to coincide with that of another invasion that also occurred on a holy day and temporarily overwhelmed the Jewish state’s defenses: namely, the Yom Kippur War, which began 50 years ago on October 6. (While that war is still remembered in Egypt for the stunning military success of its early days, it ended with the Syrian army broken, Egyptian forces surrounded, and the IDF simultaneously advancing on Cairo and Damascus.) The Israeli novelist Ruby Namdar describes his reaction to the current war, and the memories it stirred up of 1973:

Waking up [on Saturday] and glancing at my cellphone to see what was new in the world, learning about the horrific attack that Hamas had launched against so many civilians in the south of Israel, sent me straight back to that day, to the boy I was then. Shock, bewilderment, a slight nausea, a sudden urge to fight back the tears that welled in my eyes. The frightened look on the face of my parents and my aunts and uncles was the first thing that came to my mind—but now I, we, all Israelis, were those frightened grown-ups who’d lost the sense of control over our reality.

This shock has yet to dissipate—I live in New York, but most of my family and friends are in Israel. With every new bit of information, I’ve been feeling sicker and sicker to my stomach at the number of those dead, injured, or kidnapped from their home and paraded through the streets of Gaza City to the cheers of an ecstatic crowd. I write these words only to give some shape and form to the chaos that’s been ravishing my mind since yesterday morning. I am not alone.

I am not the only one to associate the shock of today’s horrific events with that of the Yom Kippur War. The date of the attack does not feel random; it seemed carefully planned for the anniversary of that accursed war, which imprinted itself in the Israeli collective memory as a loss. It has shaken our very core, robbing us of our basic sense of stability and evoking the many horrible trials our people endured before the Zionist revolution and the establishment of the state of Israel—the pogroms, the Holocaust, and the murderous attacks on the young Jewish settlement in the Palestine of the early 20th century. . . .

I hope to God that the coming few weeks will restore the physical sense of security to Israel and the Middle East, but I also fear that this trauma will linger and haunt and perhaps even define us for many, many more years.

Last Tuesday, the Houthis—the faction now ruling much of Yemen—said that they intend to renew attacks on international shipping through the Red and Arabian Seas. They had for the most part paused their attacks following the January 19 Israel-Hamas cease-fire, but their presence has continued to scare away maritime traffic near the Yemeni coast, with terrible consequences for the global economy.

The U.S. responded on Saturday by initiating strikes on Houthi missile depots, command-and-control centers, and propaganda outlets, and has promised that the attacks will continue for days, if not weeks. The Houthis responded by launching drones, and possibly missiles, at American naval ships, apparently without result. Another missile fired from Yemen struck the Sinai, but was likely aimed at Israel. As Ari Heistein has written in Mosaic, it may take a sustained and concerted effort to stop the Houthis, who have high tolerance for casualties—but this is a start. Ron Ben-Yishai provides some context:

The goal is to punish the Houthis for directly targeting Western naval vessels in the Red Sea while also exerting indirect pressure on Tehran over its nuclear program. . . . While the Biden administration did conduct airstrikes against the Houthis, it refrained from a proactive military campaign, fearing a wider regional war. However, following the collapse of Iran’s axis—including Hizballah’s heavy losses in Lebanon and the fall of the Assad regime in Syria—the Trump administration appears unafraid of such an escalation.

Iran, the thinking goes, will also get the message that the U.S. isn’t afraid to use force, or risk the consequences of retaliation—and will keep this in mind as it considers negotiations over its nuclear program. Tamir Hayman adds:

The Houthis are the last proxy of the Shiite axis that have neither reassessed their actions nor restrained their weapons. Throughout the campaign against the Yemenite terrorist organization, the U.S.-led coalition has made operational mistakes: Houthi regime infrastructure was not targeted; the organization’s leaders were not eliminated; no sustained operational continuity was maintained—only actions to remove immediate threats; no ground operations took place, not even special-forces missions; and Iran has not paid a price for its proxy’s actions.

But if this does not stop the Houthis, it will project weakness—not just toward Hamas but primarily toward Iran—and Trump’s power diplomacy will be seen as hollow. The true test is one of output, not input. The only question that matters is not how many strikes the U.S. carries out, but whether the Red Sea reopens to all vessels. We will wait and see—for now, things look brighter than they did before.