Gaza war: Why Houthis pose a stubborn challenge to US in Red Sea

Increasing military encounters between U.S. naval forces and Yemen’s Houthi fighters in the Red Sea are jeopardizing a key global transport route and adding to the risk of a regional escalation of the Israel-Hamas war. The Iran-backed Houthis have vowed to target commercial ships linked to Israel until the Jewish state stops its war in Gaza.

In the first direct lethal contact of its kind, the U.S. military says it killed 10 Houthi sailors and sank three out of four small Houthi boats that were attacking the Maersk Hangzhou cargo vessel in the southern Red Sea after dawn Sunday.

American helicopters answering a distress call from the ship came under fire from Houthis, the U.S. Central Command said on X, formerly Twitter.

Houthi officials vowed revenge, and two ballistic missiles were fired into the area late Tuesday – the 24th such Houthi attack directed against Red Sea shipping since Nov. 19, when helicopter-borne Houthi fighters hijacked the vessel Galaxy Leader and took its crew of 25 hostage.

The White House Wednesday, in a joint statement with 12 other nations, warned that Houthis would face “consequences” if they did not stop the “illegal, unacceptable, and profoundly destabilizing” attacks.

But analysts say the Houthis’ armed faceoff with American warships and helicopters, in the name of defending Palestinians in Gaza, boosts the militia’s bona fides and provides another means that the Iran-led “Axis of Resistance” – which includes the Houthis – challenges Israeli and U.S. influence in the region.

Indeed, the latest flare-up indicates that the Houthis remain undeterred by a maritime coalition of several nations created in December and led by the United States.

“The Houthis are intoxicated by their new status,” which they will be reluctant to relinquish, says Abdulghani al-Iryani, a senior researcher of the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies. “Now that they have gotten into the game, and shown that they can have an impact, if they withdraw, their PR loss will be massive.

“Taking on the Americans has symbolic value,” Mr. Iryani says. There are no “obvious” Houthi targets for the U.S. to strike, and taking out leadership members “will only increase the credibility of the Houthi movement, make them stronger, make their popular support higher. So I think they [the Houthis] are looking forward to American strikes,” he adds.

“Maybe they will not expand the range of their operations,” he says. “To hijack another vessel is too difficult now with all these warships roaming around. But they will continue to fire missiles at ships and disrupt the flow of commerce.”

The latest incidents are textbook examples of how actions in the Red Sea can escalate in a flash from calibrated to dangerous, with ramifications far beyond the Israel-Hamas conflict, which erupted Oct. 7.

From the start of that war, Houthis have fired drones and missiles at Israel from 1,000 miles away – most of them shot down by American and British ships, or by Israeli air defenses – in solidarity with Palestinians and Iran’s “axis.”

Other recent events highlight the regional reach of the Gaza war.

The most powerful wing of the loose Iranian alliance, Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia, raised the specter of expanding the war on Israel’s northern border after a senior Hamas leader, Saleh al-Arouri, was assassinated in a drone strike Tuesday in a Beirut suburb.

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said Wednesday that the killing was a “flagrant Israeli aggression,” about which “we cannot be silent.” After almost three months of near-daily cross-border artillery and rocket exchanges with Israel, he did not order a surge, but said Hezbollah would fight with “no rules” if Israel launched a war on Lebanon.

And in Iraq, a U.S. military drone Thursday killed a leader of the al-Nujaba militia in eastern Baghdad. The U.S. blames the Iran-backed group for some of the 100 attacks carried out against the U.S. military in Iraq and Syria since Oct. 7.

“We will retaliate and make the Americans regret carrying out this aggression,” local militia commander Abu Aqeel al-Moussawi told Reuters.

Just over a week earlier, in Syria, Israel killed a senior adviser of Iran’s powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in an airstrike outside Damascus. Razi Mousavi was reportedly responsible for coordinating the Syria-Iran military alliance, and was hailed by Iranian state-run media as a trusted companion of Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani – the Iranian architect of the “Axis of Resistance” who was killed in an American drone strike in 2020.

Tension in the region grew further Wednesday, when two bombs in the southeastern Iranian city of Kerman exploded, killing 84 mourners who had gathered near the grave of General Soleimani to mark four years since his death. Some Iranian officials publicly blamed Israel and the U.S. and vowed to retaliate, though the Islamic State claimed responsibility Thursday for the attack.

In the Red Sea, meanwhile, experts say that, despite the presence of the U.S.-led maritime coalition, global shipping has been disrupted. One in 5 vessels that would have passed through the Bab el Mandeb Strait and sailed up the Red Sea and through Egypt’s Suez Canal – where 12% of global seaborne trade typically passes – are now taking the much longer and costlier route around southern Africa, they say. 

“Even if America succeeds in mobilizing the entire world, our military operations will not stop ... no matter the sacrifices it costs us,” Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, a senior Houthi official, wrote on X after the creation of the U.S.-led coalition.

The Houthis would only stop their attacks, he said, if Israel’s “crimes in Gaza stop and food, medicines, and fuel are allowed to reach its besieged population.”

Houthi military losses, such as the 10 fighters killed by the U.S. in the Red Sea, enhance the group’s reputation and pale in comparison with the losses of nearly a decade of civil war, says Mr. Iryani of the Sana’a Center.

“The Houthis are willing to pay 10,000 times that to get this kind of political capital and credibility,” he says. “We’ve lost at least 400,000 lives [in Yemen since 2014], so a few tens of thousands more – it’s nothing to them.”