Riyadh, Abu Dhabi Split Turns Into Israel’s Nightmare

Empowering Weak & Oppressed

Crescent International

Rajab 18, 1447 2026-01-07

Daily News Analysis

by Crescent International

As the Saudi regime and its proxies have routed gangs supported by the UAE in Yemen, the escalating and increasingly bloody rift between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi is set to further complicate the regional picture for the zionist regime and its western patrons.

Prior to delving deeper, key background factors must be considered.

As the UAE-backed Southern Transitional Council (STC) expanded its military footprint in southern Yemen—at the expense of Saudi-aligned proxies—Riyadh launched air strikes on STC-linked targets in Mukalla and across Hadhramaut.

The Saudis argued that the STC, under Emirati patronage, had crossed Saudi “red lines.”

From the outset, Abu Dhabi appeared caught off guard, issuing disjointed statements—including a claim that the intercepted shipment of military equipment was intended for UAE forces—effectively placing the Emiratis on a direct collision course with the Saudis, a scenario the UAE was anxious to avoid.

With a small and poorly-trained armed force, the UAE withdrew from Yemen within a day, and its proxies, after suffering several hundred casualties, rapidly abandoned the positions they had captured.

Many analysts immediately began drawing comparisons to the 2017–2021 Qatar–Saudi–UAE crisis.

However, this crisis is different.

Blood has been spilled and the Saudi action publicly humiliated the self-styed regional “strongman” Mohammed bin Zayed.

In 2017 Crescent International wrote that the Saudi-UAE alliance is superficial and has some serious divergences of interest.

We envisioned infighting, contradictory war aims, and the coalition’s inability to achieve decisive results and the aggression on Yemen turning into a prolonged strategic quagmire.

The divergence of interests on the ground, however, is not the only factor that makes the UAE–Saudi clash in Yemen a far more serious crisis than the 2017 dispute with Qatar.

As pointed out by the President of the Middle East Studies’ Center in Moscow, Murad Sadygzade, “the economic competition between Abu Dhabi and Riyadh has long ceased to be “healthy rivalry for investment” and is increasingly turning into a struggle over the region’s center of gravity.

“In the economic domain, this is expressed in the tug-of-war over headquarters, logistics flows, and financial infrastructure: through Vision 2030 and the regional HQ regime, Saudi Arabia is trying to shift the managerial core to Riyadh, while the UAE is working to retain its role as the traditional hub.

“In politics, the same logic shows up in the competition for mediation platforms and influence in conflict zones from Sudan to Yemen, where different bets on local actors and different approaches to settlement generate not synergy, but friction.”

With the above in mind two additional key players in Yemen must be brought into the picture, namely Israel and the AnsarAllah.

AnsarAllah not only controls Yemen’s capital Sana‘a and is the de-facto government of Yemen, but also governs areas where roughly 70% of Yemen’s population lives.

Based on this reality, any plan that assumes a coherent Saudi–UAE–Israeli alignment against AnsarAllah requires disciplined coordination and a unified chain of command—conditions that the current Saudi-Emirati infighting has shattered.

Worse still, the speed with which Saudi- and Emirati-backed proxies routed each other in localized clashes highlights how weak the anti-AnsarAllah camp really is.

If these factions can unravel so quickly, their capacity to sustain a complex, long-term campaign against the strongest actor in Yemen is even more doubtful.

Finally, record matters: despite years of western intelligence, logistics, arms, and diplomatic cover, the coalition still failed to dislodge AnsarAllah from key population centers and strategic terrain it controls.

With proxy infighting and weak cohesion now exposed, the objective looks increasingly unattainable.

This leaves Tel Aviv confronting an Iran-aligned actor with entrenched territorial and state control and a proven willingness to keep applying asymmetric pressure on Israel in a regional quagmire.

With the Saudi–UAE proxy structure in Yemen now fractured, Israel effectively loses any plausible ground lever against AnsarAllah and is left relying primarily on standoff tools—air and missile strikes, plus air-defense interception.

But airpower alone, as recent wars have repeatedly shown, can punish at the margins without reliably producing a clean, strategic end-state against an entrenched movement which enjoys broad regional support, determination and state tools at its disposal.

Israel’s only viable posture is a long-distance war of attrition: periodic drone and missile launches from Yemen met by intermittent Israeli strikes and sustained defensive expenditures—without any realistic pathway to uproot the threat at its source.

This is a strategic dilemma Israel has been unable to resolve for two years, and it now looks even less solvable.

Most importantly, politically the bind has significantly tightened because the Saudi–Emirati rivalry has shifted from quiet competition to open rupture, making any coordinated framework to contain AnsarAllah much harder to rebuild.