by MAWADDA ISKANDAR
To fill their gaping intel void on Ansarallah, Tel Aviv and Washington have launched a covert intelligence war on Yemen. But a society steeped in resistance, coupled with Sanaa’s doctrine of silence, is proving far harder to breach than expected.
In October 2023, Yemen’s Ansarallah-aligned armed forces joined the battle in support of the Palestinian resistance’s Al-Aqsa Flood operation, and against Israel’s war on Gaza. Today, nearly two years on, a new battlefield has surfaced – far from the waters of the Red Sea or the skies of occupied Palestine.
This war does not involve drones or ballistic missiles. It is a silent, persistent, and digital invasion aimed at prying open the Sanaa government’s internal cohesion through espionage, psychological manipulation, and soft-penetration tactics.
Phone calls from the occupation state
The covert war began subtly. Mahmoud, a Yemeni journalist working with a local broadcaster, received a message from an unfamiliar international number. But what caught his attention was not just the unfamiliar digits, but the country listed beneath them: “Israel.”
“It was terrifying,” Mahmoud tells The Cradle. “The sender greeted me by my full name, praised my media work, then invited me to join their team. I immediately deleted the conversation before they could say more.”
Mahmoud’s case is not unique. Sami, a resident of Sanaa, received a different message with the same pattern. A Facebook account claiming to be a Palestinian doctor invited him to join an “academic discussion” with a Yemeni expert. It included names of well-known Yemenis who supposedly recommended him. Sensing something off, Sami reached out to those named, yet none of them knew anything about the event.
According to corroborated testimonies gathered by The Cradle from journalists and activists across Yemen, these approaches are part of a rapidly expanding campaign of Israeli and American cyber-infiltration and recruitment.
The covert intel efforts escalated rapidly after 7 October 2023, when Yemen joined the battle in direct military support of Gaza, prompting Tel Aviv and Washington to zero in on Sanaa as a priority intelligence target.
The intelligence vacuum
Yemen’s drone and missile strikes rattled Israeli shipping lanes, and also struck deep inside the occupied state, targeting key military and economic infrastructure, penetrating as far as Ben Gurion Airport. That unanticipated resistance front exposed what Israeli security elites later admitted was a significant intelligence void.
“Israel has many years of familiarity with those enemies [Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas]. There is intelligence and there is the important element of a ground maneuver, and in Yemen we can’t do that. The scale here is different,” Eyal Pinko, a former Israeli defense official and senior research fellow at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies – an Israeli think tank – was quoted as saying.
Until 18 November 2023, neither Mossad nor the military intelligence unit Aman had prioritized penetration and information gathering activities in Yemen. But after sustained attacks from Sanaa, internal Israeli discussions shifted. Calls emerged for “intelligence openness” toward Yemen to narrow the margin of surprise.
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