All it takes is a ship "forgetting" to raise the anchor and running it over the cable, snapping it.

Might have happened outside Finland last year [1].

[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/estonia-says-chinese-sh...

Also happened in Anguilla (Caribbean Sea) last year—some rich person's yacht ran over the ECFS cable [0]. Google went in afterwards and tested one of their moonshot projects—free-space laser communications [1]—as a temporary backhaul.

[0] https://theanguillian.com/2023/02/rapid-response-from-flow-r...

[1] https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231101666271/en/Lib...

Helpfully, the Houthis threatened to do this before it happened. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-68231945

Perhaps not quite enough for a conviction in a court of law, but definitely a balance of probabilities.

People will assign blame whether or not they have proof. E.g. the threshold for blaming the Houthi's like the article does is near zero since "everyone" already see them as a threat in the area, so assigning blame or not is down to how much force Western powers will use, not whether or not they use it.

> Wouldn’t it be almost impossible to assign blame?

That didn't stop governments trying with nordstream.