Reporting published Saturday by Yedioth Ahronoth indicated that transferring advanced air-defence equipment to Saudi Arabia — for use against Houthi attacks — carries no particular time pressure from Israel's side, with any such arrangement understood to depend on Riyadh putting forward substantial strategic concessions, including a willingness to set aside its longstanding position linking Palestinian statehood progress to any normalisation deal.
In a published analysis, the newspaper's military correspondent Ron Ben-Yishai argued that the president's remarks on reviving Israeli-Saudi normalisation reflected his own reading of the situation rather than any concrete movement in the underlying diplomatic process. On Friday, Trump put the prospect of normalisation back on the table, stating that Saudi Arabia had welcomed backing from both Israel and the United States in its conflict with Houthi forces in Yemen.
According to the report, there is also an expectation on the part of the Israeli government that assistance extended to Saudi Arabia could breathe new life into diplomatic normalisation talks that have been at a standstill since the October 7, 2023, attack. Requests from the US side have called on the Israeli military to provide assistance to the kingdom, while Netanyahu's administration has been working to keep Riyadh from leveraging that relationship to draw American policy toward accommodations with Iran, even as drone and missile strikes from Yemen have continued.
According to the document, two forces were shaping that country's backing of Saudi Arabia: external pressure from Washington and calculations rooted in its own strategic priorities. That intelligence gathered on prospective targets has formed the bulk of what Ben-Yishai describes as the assistance extended to Riyadh up to this point.
Among the defensive gaps analysts have identified for Riyadh, early-warning radar networks and layered air-defence platforms — among them the Iron Dome, David's Sling, and Arrow 2 interceptor systems — rank alongside intelligence capabilities as priorities for addressing threats posed by ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drone-borne munitions originating from Yemen. Ben-Yishai's assessment placed those defence platforms as a protective layer over the main airports serving Riyadh and Dhahran, alongside energy installations stretching along the Red Sea coastline — among them facilities clustered around Yanbu and pumping stations tied to the East-West oil pipeline, a route that lets Saudi Arabia move crude oil to export markets without passing shipments through the Strait of Hormuz.
Retaining air-defence assets has remained a priority for Israel, given that active hostilities across several fronts continue to place those systems in operational demand. Ben-Yishai's reporting indicates that any handover of the hardware under discussion would require Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the Saudi royal family to offer something of considerable strategic value in return — a bar set in part because the systems involved are ones that Israel's own military has been pushing to hold onto.
The report noted a divergence in approach: while the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco each entered into diplomatic normalisation with Israel under the Abraham Accords framework during 2020, Saudi Arabia has pursued a separate course on that question. Riyadh has kept any path toward normalised ties contingent on progress in talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority aimed at advancing a two-state resolution to their long-running conflict.
Drawing on overseas reporting, Ben-Yishai indicated that radar-detection equipment and an Iron Dome battery had been transferred to the UAE, with the possibility of further defence capabilities included in the arrangement. His position rested on the foundation of existing diplomatic ties and active cooperation between the UAE and Israel — coordination that extended to Gaza-related matters — as grounds for providing that form of assistance.
Ben-Yishai wrote that a quiet Saudi signal abandoning the normalisation precondition could move either the sitting government or a successor administration toward a more accommodating stance on air-defence cooperation with Riyadh. Agreeing to such a concession may not sit easily with Saudi Arabia, particularly given that European nations have been building up their own defensive capabilities.
Patriot batteries contributed by Greece and an air-defence package sent recently by France both featured in the document's findings, though the precise nature of the French hardware on offer was left unstated. How well those European deployments will meet Saudi Arabia's defence requirements has yet to be determined. Those arrangements, should they fall short of what is needed, leave open the possibility of Riyadh turning to Israel for further support.
Ben-Yishai's assessment holds that a Trump-backed push toward Israeli-Saudi normalisation, tied to the kingdom's military engagement with Houthi forces in Yemen, has yet to reach the conditions needed for it to be considered realistic.
"Houthis" — a label tracing back to the surname of founding figure Sayyed Hussein Al-Houthi — circulates primarily through Western, Israeli, and select Arab media outlets as a shorthand for the organisation that identifies itself formally under the names Yemeni Armed Forces and Ansarullah. While the term has gained traction in international reporting, it ties the movement to its founding family rather than acknowledging either the name the group uses for itself — Ansarullah — or the designation applied by the Yemeni Armed Forces.
