The Telegraph reported yesterday that Tehran has ordered its personnel to leave Yemen as the U.S. escalates its bombing campaign and moves more military hardware into the region. Yet, despite the headline’s claim, I doubt this means that Iran is abandoning the Houthis, whom it provides lavishly with equipment, funds, and training. As Ari Heistein and Jason M. Brodsky have argued in Mosaic, it might take more drastic measures to deter the Yemen-based terrorist regime. Reuel Marc Gerecht explains:

American, European, and Israeli reprisals against the Houthis are likely refortifying an old Iranian doctrine: that the Islamic Republic’s enemies are willing to attack the clerical regime’s proxies, but not Iran directly. The Israelis discombobulated this in October 2024, but now it seems to be back in force.

Yet until Iranian supplies are cut off directly, checkmating the Houthis is impossible. The U.S. and allied navies and air forces have so far failed to stop the Houthis harassing shipping. And they are unlikely to do better until the United States is willing to attack Iranian ports—the primary entrepôts for the Houthis—while also hitting Yemeni targets. Unlike the Houthis, the clerical regime has much to lose in a duel with the United States.

For now, however, Trump still believes that a nuclear deal with [the Iranian supreme leader Ali] Khamenei is possible. And until he abandons this idea, he’ll likely have no more success against the Houthis than his predecessor. . . . [T]he nuclear issue cannot be separated from the Islamic Republic’s proxy imperialism. They are solved together, or they are lost separately.

Addressing a recent meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Committee, Mahmoud Abbas criticized Hamas more sharply than he has previously (at least in public), calling them “sons of dogs.” The eighty-nine-year-old Palestinian Authority president urged the terrorist group to “stop the war of extermination in Gaza” and “hand over the American hostages.” The editors of the New York Sun comment:

Mr. Abbas has long been at odds with Hamas, which violently ousted his Fatah party from Gaza in 2007. The tone of today’s outburst, though, is new. Comparing rivals to canines, which Arabs consider dirty, is startling. Its motivation, though, was unrelated to the plight of the 59 remaining hostages, including 23 living ones. Instead, it was an attempt to use an opportune moment for reviving Abbas’s receding clout.

[W]hile Hamas’s popularity among Palestinians soared after its orgy of killing on October 7, 2023, it is now sinking. The terrorists are hoarding Gaza aid caches that Israel declines to replenish. As the war drags on, anti-Hamas protests rage across the Strip. Polls show that Hamas’s previously elevated support among West Bank Arabs is also down. Striking the iron while it’s hot, Abbas apparently longs to retake center stage. Can he?

Diminishing support for Hamas is yet to match the contempt Arabs feel toward Abbas himself. Hamas considers him irrelevant for what it calls “the resistance.”

[Meanwhile], Abbas is yet to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacre. His recent announcement of ending alms for terror is a ruse.

Abbas, it’s worth noting, hasn’t saved all his epithets for Hamas. He also twice said of the Americans, “may their fathers be cursed.” Of course, after a long career of anti-Semitic incitement, Abbas can’t be expected to have a moral awakening. Nor is there much incentive for him to fake one. But, like the protests in Gaza, Abbas’s recent diatribe is a sign that Hamas is perceived as weak and that its stock is sinking.