Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - EMERGENCY EPISODE: Houthi Missile Hits Ben Gurion Airport - with Nadav Eyal

Episode Date: May 4, 2025

Watch Call me Back on YouTube: youtube.com/@CallMeBackPodcastSubscribe to Ark Media’s new podcast ‘What’s Your Number?’: lnk.to/HJI2mXArk Media on Instagram: instagram.com/arkmediaorgTo contact us, sign up for updates, and access transcripts, visit: arkmedia.orgDan on X: x.com/dansenorDan on Instagram: instagram.com/dansenorToday’s episode:The Iran-backed Houthis fired a ballistic missile at Ben Gurion Airport on Sunday morning. The IDF said it tried to intercept the missile using Arrow and THAAD systems, but failed. A number of US and international airlines have since suspended flights in and out of Israel. This was the first time the Houthis had successfully hit Israel’s national airport. To help us understand what happened and possible next steps, we are joined by CallMeBack regular Nadav Eyal for an emergency episode. CREDITS:ILAN BENATAR - Producer & EditorMARTIN HUERGO - Sound EditorGABE SILVERSTEIN - ResearchYUVAL SEMO - Music Composer

The Houthis are attempting to have as much damage and casualties in Israel as they can. You remember how the banner of the Houthis looks like Dan, there are slogans there about death to Israel. This is what they want. This is not an escalation as to their intent. And you should always measure intent. And there is a lesson here. And Israel has learned that lesson on October 7 as to Hamas and Gaza.

And that lesson is how difficult it is if you don't tackle it when it's still small. And the world has allowed the HOOTI problem to grow and grow. It's 11 a.m. on Sunday, May 4th here in New York City. It is 6 p.m. on Sunday, May 4th in Israel. Per our usual programming schedule, we will be releasing an episode as planned, late tonight for Monday morning, but we wanted to offer a quick update

about something we all care about, Israel's Ben Gurion Airport being hit with a Houthi missile earlier today, leading to a number of airlines announcing that they will be halting their flights to Israel. With me is Nadav Ayal, senior analyst at Yediut Aharonot. Nadav, what can you tell us about this strike today at Ben Gurion Airport? So at about 9.30 today in Israel, 9.30 a.m., there were sirens across the country as a

result of a missile, a ballistic missile, shot by the Houthis towards Israel. And right afterwards, it's not exactly right afterwards because there's flight time all the way from Yemen. There was a very loud blast heard across the central region in Israel and close to the Ben Gurion airport. This missile hit the premises of the Ben Gurion airport. And there were, you know, a ton of videos both by people driving in the roads leading to the Ben Gurion airport or near the Ben Gurion airport and also from the airport, by the way, also of foreign crew of foreign airlines that

were there at the airport near the planes. Now, this missile did not hit any plane, either landing or stationed at the Begunion airport. There were three people injured, but the fact that the missile actually landed at the airport is meaningful and I'm probably going to discuss this. As the missile was approaching, it was recognized by the Israeli radar. And there were two interceptors shorted it. The first interceptor was an arrow interceptor, a hit interceptor, and it didn't manage to hit it. Then a THAAD.

THAAD is an American anti-ballistic missile system that was stationed in Israel by the orders, I think, of President Biden at the time, President Trump even enhanced that defense. And that missile, THAAD, also didn't manage to hit the Houthi missile. The Houthis immediately said then that they shot a new missile. The Israelis are saying, no, it's the same missiles that we have managed to intercept before. And this thing might happen.

We're still investigating how it happened. There's a possibility that part of the missile was hit, but its warhead wasn't and it landed in the airport and blew up. They don't know yet. There's a crater there, but this means that almost immediately, flights that were destined to land at the Israeli airport in Ben Gurion had to circle in the air, some of it circled back, and foreign airlines started announcing that they're not going to fly for the time being for Israel. They didn't say for how much time, but they're basically saying for the next couple of days, at least I'm talking about Locos, but also France and others, Lufthansa, United, British Airways, Delta, ITA, the Italian one, Austrian, Air India, Iberia, and Ryanair. For now, I should say, for now, we don't know if this is going to be a change of policy.

And this has been, I should say, after a long war in which these foreign airlines were cancelling and actually the only airline that was flying from Israel to around the world is Al Al and they saw a lot of profit, prices of tickets went up substantially. They actually had a monopoly over flights to and from Israel with a few exceptions. One of them that was mentioned on your show by yourself at the time was, of course, by airlines flying from the UAE, from the Gulf countries that continued flying to Israel during the war.

Nadezhda, do you know, and it may be too early to know, but do we know how this missile penetrated Israel's air defenses? Like you talk about the THAAD, you talk about all these capabilities. So what went wrong? It's still being investigated. First of all, it's a matter of statistics. It's not that it wasn't recognized, right?

When you had sirens and the sirens went on time, so it was identified at the right time by Israel's extremely sensitive radar that is attached to the Arrow system. It's actually two different systems that are coordinated. And of course, this is a major achievement, unfortunately, for the Houthis. Now, this is the third time in history that Israel's air defenses, together with TAD, American TAD, fails in intercepting a ballistic missile,

an Iranian ballistic missile, I should say, because this is an Iranian ballistic missile. You see the remarks made by the Houthis, I would warn against buying into any of their statements. They're saying that they're shooting, for instance, hypersonic missiles, but the truth is that they're not. Okay. So do you think the Houthis, I mean, I hate to go there, but I will.

Do you think the Houthis intended to hit aircraft? Because this is a pretty brazen move. Assuming they targeted the airport, they know there's a risk that they'll hit civilian aircraft and then one can imagine the repercussions of that. It just seems like an extraordinarily brazen and dramatic escalation that the Houthis are experimenting with. The Houthis are attempting to have as much damage and casualties in Israel as they can. This is not an escalation as to their intent. And you should always measure intent.

The fact that the Israelis managed in so far together with the US and with the support of this administration and the previous administration to intercept most of these missiles or all of these missiles except three, it testifies as to the success rate of the Israeli air defenses and the American air defenses. But it's absolutely their target to kill as many Israelis as they can. This is what they're saying. You remember how the banner of the Houthis looks like, Dan. There are slogans there about death to Israel. And Israel and the Jews are actually mentioned twice in that banner or flag of the Houthis. This is what they want. Now, what's happening is that there is a competition of learning between the Iranians who are supervising and guiding the Houthis and are making their launch attempts better and better and between the Israeli air defenses.

And this competition is going on. They are studying the Israeli success in interception and they're trying to bypass that. One of the things that they started doing is that they started launching not during nighttime. So you might remember this, Dan, and many people who visited Israel during Pesach, during Passover, remember that, that the Houthis launch usually during the night because they want the entire country to wake up and to run to the shelter rooms, right?

But they started shooting during daylight. And one of the reasons, and now I'm speculating, is that they assume that it makes the interception actually harder during the night. Now, this is their assumption as to technical reasons. And I will naturally not go into more speculation as to that. But indeed the Houthis have been expanding the rate of launching of missiles. And the assumption in Israel is that this is because the American attacks on their infrastructure

are so substantial that they want to launch whatever they have while they still have it, right? Before the Trump administration causes them this kind of damage. Now, according to the US Central Command that has now two task forces and two aircraft carriers, the Truman and the Carl Vincente, the American attacks there have caused a decline of about 60 to 70 percent in the launching of ballistic missiles from Yemen against Israel and against American and Israeli ships at the Red Sea. But they still have launching abilities and the reason for that, Dan, is because these launching abilities are mobile and they are short from different positions within the immense territory of Yemen. So it makes it very hard to see those and to destroy those. The US, the Trump administration is working very hard to try and derail the moving of arms from Iran into Yemen.

And we're also hearing these direct threats made by the Trump administration, by Secretary of Defense Pete Hicksworth, as to the way that the Iranians have been supporting the Houthi regime. How do you think Israel will retaliate? Well, Prime Minister Netanyahu has said that there would be, I'm going to translate a Hebrew expression, he said, it's not going to be a bang and then it's over, but there are going to be a lot of bangs. So this is basically his remark. He had a video on, he said, we are acting in coordination with the Americans. We have acted before against the Houthi and we are going to act against them

also in the future. To that, a senior Houthi official tweeted on X, and in Hebrew, by the way, we managed to close the Elat port. We will close Natberg too. We will close what too? The Ben Gurion Airport too. Oh, Ben Gurion Airport, got it. And Natberg, it's a short in Hebrew

for the Ben Gurion Airport. And he did that in Hebrew. Look, the Houthi threat is a major challenge when the assumption is that no one wants to have boots on the ground and everybody knows that it's not going to be as efficient. But as long as you have that regime there, Dan. The Iranian regime. The Houthi regime that was supported by Iran. The Iranians are telling the Americans, we

have ceased to have control of the Houthis. That's the argument made by the Islamic Republic. We're pressuring them to stop for now. We don't have effective control of the Houthis. We did support them in the past. By the way, Dan, and this is something we mentioned in previous chapters, when you talk with Saudis, they always have this remark, you know, we fought the Houthis. We understood what the Houthis are before they managed to jeopardize international shipping not only to Israel and lead to this substantial economic damage for the entire world community. And then you guys, and they mean mainly the Obama administration, you came to us, this

is what they tell the Americans, and you asked us to stop because of human rights issues in Yemen and because the war was so aggressively fought by the Saudis. So we knew that we needed to take out the Houthis. Where were you back then? And now, you know, the Saudis are saying, look, what's happened. They started by attacking us, the Saudis, but that was fine, right? This had regional context. Now they're attacking everybody. It's a classic story, you know, that the Saudi officials would say about fundamentalism and the need to fight it everywhere, which is something

they won't say to the Israelis. But I had a conversation like that with someone from Saudi Arabia. So they would sit across the table. That was during the Biden administration. And the Saudis, the Gulf countries, and the Israelis would be in total agreement that the US, meaning back then the Biden administration, don't understand yet what's the Middle East about and the need to fight and hold off the Iranian proxies.

I think that changed to be completely fair with the Biden administration. It did change. They began the operations and of course, President Trump expanded them so substantially. Well, first the Biden administration took the Houthis off the designated terror list of the US government. There was a lot of repair work. They began that, but it's really the president who has committed himself and his administration to winning against the Houthis. And in that regard, I think the landing of this missile

in Ben Gurion Airport is not going to lead the Israelis to decide, oh no, we're going to take care of it. We're replacing the US. No, there are two aircraft carriers of the United States of America Trying to tackle this challenge and the Israelis feel very certain that with time it will actually happen And as you and I talked about on another conversation that will be released later, which is our regular non-emergency episode the Houthis is The one area of the Middle East where President Trump just seems totally is the one area of the Middle East where President Trump just seems totally comfortable almost being at war with in some way. I take your point, not boots on the ground war, but there's both the rhetoric and the policy are pretty committed.

Yeah. And because they're committed, I don't see these operations ceasing. You know, let's be honest about this. Until now, the ability of the Houthis to hit the US and to cause casualties, which is the major thing that as far as the American public is concerned, and you know, like the Israeli public is concerned, that's the main threat. Their ability is limited. Although we have heard that F-18 that was lost as a result of a Houthi attack against

an aircraft carrier. A US F-18 that was on an aircraft carrier, from what we understand, I don't think we have all the details, but what we know is that the aircraft carrier had to make a sudden maneuver and the F-18 apparently kind of went off the aircraft carrier. This is an aircraft that cost something like $67 million. I mean, this is not an inexpensive US military asset. No, no, that's a major escalation. But here's the point.

If you've got terror organizations that take control of states and have ballistic missiles, and they don't care about the population anymore, they don't represent the population, and they're fundamentalists, they're just going to die to the end. This is what the Houthis are saying that they're going to do. And there is a lesson here, and Israel has learned that lesson on October 7 as to Hamas and Gaza that had missiles, not ballistic missiles, but a lot of rockets shot at Israel. And as to Hezbollah that had both missiles and rockets that were aimed at Israel and as far as they were concerned wanted to shoot dozens of thousands of rockets as to Israel

and the IDF managed to completely destroy that program. And that lesson is how difficult it is if you don't tackle it when it's still small and you allow it to grow. And the world has allowed the Houthi problem to grow and grow. And it's just one element. I think that the US would want to see, towards the Trump visit in the region, would want to see this to an extent settling down, at least for the time of the visit.

So it won't rob the attention from the success stories that the White House is trying to engineer during that visit. For instance, the signing of agreements of trade with Saudi Arabia that will mean many, many more jobs for the US. All right, Nadeav, we will leave it there. Thank you. I'm sure there'll be much more in the days ahead on this. So thank you for this quick update.

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