Houthis Say They Hit Tel Aviv With Hypersonic Ballistic Missile

The Attack

by Cameron Curtis

On September 15, 2024, the Houthis successfully struck at Tel Aviv with an IRBM fired from Yemen. Israeli claims that the missile was intercepted cannot be confirmed. The attack was shrouded in the fog of war. There were reports that the missile struck near Tel Aviv airport.

Later reports claimed that Iron Dome missiles proved ineffective against the missile. This is not unexpected because the Iron Dome is a short-range air defense system that is most useful against slow, unguided artillery rockets and subsonic cruise missiles. The question is whether Arrow 3 and Patriot air defense missiles were engaged. If so, they also missed.

The Houthis claimed that they had fired a “hypersonic ballistic missile” and published a video purporting to be of the missile’s launch. A picture of the missile from that video is displayed in Figure 1 at the top of this article. The video published by the Houthis is available here: Houthi video of missile launch.

The claim that the missile was “hypersonic” is disingenuous. In practice, almost all ballistic missiles are hypersonic in their terminal phase. Even the German V2 from World War II reached Mach 5 in its terminal phase and gave no warning before impact.

In fact, there is reason to believe that the video published by the Houthis was not a video of the actual missile fired. Some analysts thought the missile was a variant of the Iranian Fatah-110 missile. This writer finds that improbable. It might be a video of a Fatah-110, but that missile has a range of only 400km and a speed of Mach 4. It could not have done the job. The strike was a success. Why publish a misleading video?

The missile in question was far beyond the indigenous ability of the Houthis to develop. It was probably a variant of a more advanced Iranian missile – a Shahab 3, Emab 1, or Seijil (Ashura). Variants of these three all have ranges of up to 2,000km and can reach Tel Aviv. The Shahab and Emab are liquid-fuelled. The Seijil (Ashura) is solid-fuelled. All three are road-mobile.

Figure 2 shows the ranges of ballistic missiles in the Iranian arsenal. Notice that the longer-range missiles that could have done the job do not have the nose fins of the Fatah-110 shown in the published video.