Last Week in Sanaa: A ‘Decapitation’ Airstrike — Assassinations by Another Name
By Jaffa Levy in London and Abu Rashid in Sana’a
Last week — Thursday, August 28, 2025 — an airstrike hit the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, killing Prime Minister Ahmed al-Rahawi and several cabinet colleagues.
SANAA, Yemen — By dawn the posters had already gone up: the prime minister’s face reproduced in grainy monochrome, a strip of black in the corner, names of other officials densely typeset below. Loudspeakers throbbed with elegies and martial anthems; mopeds stitched through the crowds with green flags fixed to their tail racks. In a city that has learned to turn mourning into logistics, stewards marked out procession routes with rope and plastic cones while civil servants folded the day’s condolence schedules into dog-eared notebooks.
Two days earlier, an Israeli airstrike hit the Yemeni capital, killing Ahmed al-Rahawi, the prime minister of the Houthi-run government, along with several cabinet colleagues, according to the group and international wire services. Israel said it had targeted senior Houthi military figures; the Houthis announced that multiple ministers were dead and vowed revenge. Funerals were slated for Monday.
For a country still clawing back from years of war and blockade, the killings were jolting less for their novelty than for the portfolio: technocrats and administrators, not merely commanders. Yemen has endured a decade of conflict and an aid-starved humanitarian crisis. The Saudi-led intervention and restrictions on ports were widely blamed by aid agencies for turbo-charging hunger and disease; U.N. agencies still describe Yemen as among the world’s worst humanitarian emergencies.
The Names Behind the Headlines
The Houthis have been sparse with full, official casualty lists. Local outlets and Yemeni analysts nevertheless circulated overlapping rosters that included cabinet figures such as Jalal al-Rowaishan (deputy prime minister), Hashem Sharaf al-Din (information), Mohammed al-Muwlad (youth and sports), Ali Saif Mohammed Hassan (electricity/energy/water), Mujahid Ahmed Abdullah Ali (justice and human rights), Radwan al-Rubaie (agriculture), and Ali Qasim al-Yafei (culture). International wires confirmed the prime minister’s death and said “several” ministers were killed, while noting details remained incomplete.
Mr. al-Rahawi himself was a southerner from Abyan and a member of the General People’s Congress, allied to but distinct from the Houthis’ core movement. His elevation in 2024 was seen by regional watchers as political rather than ideological; on Saturday his deputy was named acting prime minister.
On Sunday, amid tightened security after the strike, Houthi security services raided several U.N. agency offices in the capital and detained staff, moves condemned by the United Nations. The raids underscored how the assassination fallout has fused with Yemen’s fraught relationship with outside actors.
Lessons Written in Black Banners
In Sanaa’s markets, where weapon-polished phrases pass from one mouth to the next, the same lesson was repeated: assassinations harden, not weaken. That is not a political judgment so much as a pattern etched across the region’s recent history. Whether in Yemen, Lebanon, Iran or the Palestinian territories, eliminating elites has, time and again, rearranged leadership but rarely dissolved the movements they helped lead.
Beirut’s Aftershocks
In Lebanon last year, a concentrated sequence of strikes and explosions erased much of Hezbollah’s top tier. Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary-general for three decades, was killed in a late-September 2024 airstrike in Beirut’s southern suburbs, according to U.S. congressional researchers and multiple major outlets. In the weeks around it, senior lieutenants Ibrahim Aqil, Fuad Shukr, and Wissam al-Tawil were also killed in separate strikes, while Hashem Safieddine, widely tipped as successor, was confirmed dead by the group in October. The operations were widely attributed to Israel; in several cases Israeli officials spoke on the record. Hezbollah’s street muscle and rocket cadence did not disappear in the aftermath.
Tehran’s Scientists, a New Phase
What was once the shadowy theater of car bombs and motorbikes in Tehran went, this June, violently overt. During a short, pitched war between Israel and Iran, airstrikes across Iran killed a group of nuclear scientists and senior commanders, including Fereydoun Abbasi, a former head of the Atomic Energy Organization, and Mohammad Mehdi Tehranchi, an academic leader and physicist, according to Iranian and international reporting. Western think tanks, scientific journals and Reuters all tallied a broader roll of specialists lost in the opening salvos. Iran vowed to rebuild and disperse its talent; outside analysts called it an unprecedented strike on human capital.
Palestinian Precedents
For Palestinians, the practice is an old one. Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and his successor Abdel-Aziz al-Rantisi were killed by helicopter-launched missiles in Gaza in 2004. In January 2024, Saleh al-Arouri, Hamas’s deputy leader, died in a strike on a Beirut office. In 2025, Hamas’s armed wing publicly confirmed that Mohammed Deif and his deputy Marwan Issa, long described by Israel as architects of the group’s operations, had been killed in Gaza. In July 2024, Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s political chief, was assassinated in Tehran; Israel declined public comment at the time as regional capitals braced for retaliation.
A Long Reach
Intelligence services have hunted adversaries abroad for decades; Israel’s Mossad is most often associated with such operations. The 1973 Lillehammer affair, a botched hit in Norway that killed the wrong man, became a byword for the risks of covert warfare. In Dubai in 2010, the killing of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh exposed an operation that used a suite of forged European passports, drawing diplomatic protest. These episodes are part of the open record, even if attribution in more recent cases is cast in careful circumlocution.
In Arab Capitals, Caution
If Yemen’s streets sounded like a drum, many Arab capitals spoke in sotto voce. Statements since June have tended toward calls for restraint and de-escalation rather than explicit endorsements or detailed condemnations — a posture that grew more pronounced during the Israel-Iran flare-up this summer, when the United Arab Emirates urged against “uncalculated, reckless steps.” Saudi Arabia, recalibrating regional diplomacy after the Gaza war, has likewise avoided high-decibel commitments. On the Yemen strike itself, initial responses from major Arab governments were muted as officials watched for retaliation.
Does It Work?
The strategic debate is old, the evidence stubborn. Assassinations can remove unique skills at key moments — as Iran’s loss of senior nuclear scientists arguably demonstrates — but the political effects are mixed. Movements often treat funerals as recruitment seminars; new cadres step forward with the sanction of the dead. In Gaza, in Lebanon, in Yemen’s northern highlands, black banners have not been a terminus but a waystation.
In Sanaa, that logic was visible in small gestures. A woman at a street-corner kiosk pressed date sweets into a stranger’s palm and told him to eat; two mechanics pinned a badge with Mr. al-Rahawi’s face to a boy’s shirt. Elsewhere, the posters waited in stacks, still warm from the printer. However the strike was meant to shape the battlefield, it had already redrawn the city’s daily map.
