When Retaliation Breaks the City: Reflections on Israel’s Strikes on Sanaa

I’ve been following the reports of Israeli strikes on Yemen’s capital with a mix of anger, sorrow and a weary kind of inevitability. The same pattern repeats itself: an attack, a counterattack, photographs of smoke rising over a city skyline, and the same human faces — mothers, shopkeepers, children — caught between strategies and slogans.

Over the last days the Israeli military said it struck sites in Sanaa including a military compound near the presidential palace, power plants and fuel storage facilities in what it described as retaliation for missile and drone launches by the Iran‑aligned Houthi movement “Israeli strikes hit Yemen’s capital in retaliation for earlier Houthi attacks,” The Guardian. Other outlets reported similar targets and varying casualty figures as the fog of war made verification difficult AP News, CNN and Sky News.

What crystallized my worry this week was not only the strikes themselves, but the reported use of cluster‑type submunitions by the Houthis — a weapon that multiplies danger for civilians and for years remains a hazard long after the headlines have moved on Times of Israel. The very thought of indiscriminate submunitions falling over populated areas speaks to a degradation of whatever norms limit the savagery of war.

The images are blunt and terrible: a massive fireball over an oil facility, shattered windows in residential blocks, ambulances threading streets choked with smoke ABC News, NBC News. We are told these strikes are reprisals — a tactical calculus that in the short term may alter an opponent’s capabilities — but the long term arithmetic is different: damaged power plants, destroyed fuel sites and broken infrastructure deepen misery, erode civic institutions and make recovery harder for the very populations international law is supposed to protect AP News.

I do not write this as a naive pacifist. States have a legitimate right to defend their citizens. When missiles cross borders, moral clarity compels a response. But legitimacy is not limitless; it is conditioned by proportionality and by the constant moral obligation to minimize harm to civilians. That boundary appears increasingly brittle in this conflict. Leaders speak of deterrence and retribution from command centers thousands of kilometers away while families in Sanaa — and in Gaza, and in Israeli towns under threat — live the consequences daily Times of Israel, CNN.

There is another, vital strand to this unfolding tragedy: the regionalization of what began as one conflict. The Houthis present themselves as acting in solidarity with Palestinians, and they have received political and, allegedly, material support from Iran — a fact that turns a local insurgency into a lever in wider regional rivalries AP News, Sky News. When Iran’s leaders publicly praise such actions, the danger of escalation grows and so does the chance that miscalculation will pull more actors into direct confrontation CNN.

It’s remarkable, and cruelly predictable, how quickly urban life degrades under this pressure. A damaged power plant means hospitals working on generators, sewage lines threatened, food that cannot be refrigerated. Fuel depot strikes interrupt supply chains and humanitarian relief. These are not abstract consequences; they are the erosion of a city’s ability to sustain life. The humanitarian toll is not collateral damage in some distant calculus — it is the point where strategy meets human flesh AP News.

I find myself thinking about the moral imagination required to break cycles like this. Military action, in isolation, can change tactical facts on the ground, but it rarely addresses the grievances, fears and political narratives that create—and then legitimize—violence. When the consequences of strikes disproportionately fall on civilians, those consequences seed new round(s) of grievance and provide fertile ground for the very extremisms states claim to oppose.

So where does that leave us? For me the answer is not a naïve plea for immediate disarmament nor an excuse to avoid responsibility. It is an insistence on two truths at once:

• Political violence must be met with measures that protect civilians and obey the laws and norms intended to limit wartime cruelty — above all proportionality and discrimination between military and civilian objects Times of Israel on norms around cluster munitions and international law.

• Lasting security is rarely built from airstrikes alone. It is built by addressing root causes: political exclusion, regional rivalries, humanitarian deprivation and the diplomatic failures that let grievance calcify into aggression.

I am worried because the instruments we now see in play — long‑range strikes, submunitions, naval and air interdiction of ports — create incentives not for cooling but for diffusion. The more actors see gains from punishing distant proxies, the more the map of violence expands. Already we have seen how shipping in the Red Sea and global commerce have been disrupted by these dynamics, and how diplomatic arrangements can be undermined or exploited AP News coverage of maritime disruptions and previous deals with the Houthis.

I’ll end on a quiet honesty: in a world wired for instant retaliation and broadcast spectacle, the least glamorous work—patient, unattractive diplomacy—becomes more urgent, not less. If history tells us anything, it is that military action without political settlement is a temporary correction, not a cure. If we are to honor the lives we claim to protect, we must insist on responses that are proportionate, verifiable and accompanied by serious efforts to open political pathways that remove the incentives for proxy escalation.

These are hard, often tedious conversations. They lack the clarity of a pinpoint strike or the immediate satisfaction of a public declaration. But they are the work of preserving cities, of keeping hospitals open, and of stopping the small deaths that accumulate into catastrophe.

I am watching these events with the unease of someone who remembers that wars are collections of avoidable choices — and I am convinced that the moral urgency of our moment is to make different ones.

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Regards,
Hemen Parekh