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Flames and smoke rise from the site of Israeli air strikes at the port of Hodeidah, Yemen July 21, 2024.
Israel and the Houthis escalate their fight
In support of Palestinians now under fire in Gaza, Houthi rebels based in Yemen have attacked ships they say are affiliated with Israel in the Red Sea and have sent missiles and drones flying toward Israeli targets. Israel, with help from the US and neighboring Arab countries, has blocked most of those attacks.
But last Friday, the Houthis claimed credit for adrone attack on a Tel Aviv apartment building that killed one Israeli man and injured eight more. Israel responded with air strikes on the Houthi-controlled Red Sea port of Hodeidah in Yemen. Authorities there said the Israeli attack killed three civilians and injured 80.
The Biden administration has designated the Houthis a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist Group,” but has so far stopped short of the more serious label as a ”Global Terrorist Organization” for fear that automatically resulting sanctions would do little to deter the group but deepen the misery of Yemen’s large number of starving people.
There are several questions raised by this dramatic Israel-Houthi escalation.
- Will it distract Israel’s government from the more dangerous fights with Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon?
- The Houthis claim the Saudis, who fought the Houthis in Yemen’s civil war, provided the Israeli strike with access to its airspace. Can the Saudis stay out of the conflict?
- How much damage will Iran allow their Houthi allies to sustain before they become directly involved?
- Will the attack on this crucial Yemeni port add to the humanitarian disaster inside Yemen?
Neither the Saudis nor Iran wants to get caught in a shooting war. And despite the escalation, the Israeli-Houthi fight will probably remain contained. But the stakes are high enough that no government in the region can afford to stop watching.
The Galaxy Leader commercial ship, seized by Yemen's Houthis last month, is seen off the coast of al-Salif, Yemen, December 5, 2023.
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8: A South Florida jury found US banana giant Chiquita liable for the deaths of eight men killed by the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC, a right-wing paramilitary group designated as terrorists by the US. Chiquita, which financed the AUC with nearly $2 million, was ordered to pay the victims’ families $38.3 million in penalties. Under its former name, the United Fruit Company, Chiquita was famously meddlesome in Latin American politics – its infamous 1928 massacre of striking banana workers in Colombia was immortalized in Nobel laureate Gabriel García Marquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”
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1,265: Pink slime is oozing through America. A new study has found that at least 1,265 websites are masquerading as local news outlets while drawing funding from dark money sources or openly political financiers on the left and right. The sites are particularly concentrated in swing states. The grossest part of the story? Owing to the long-standing decline of local journalism, these imposter sites, known as “pink slime” (a beef industry term), now outnumber legitimate local outlets for the first time.
Saudi Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman meets with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken at the Al Yamamah Palace in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, April 29, 2024.
Are the Saudis after peace in Yemen again?
Saudi Arabia is reportedly showing fresh interest in a roadmap to peace in Yemen that was iced late last year in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel.
The background: For a decade, Saudi Arabia has backed the Yemeni government in a brutal civil war against the Iran-backed Houthi rebels who now control most of the country. The conflict plunged Yemen into a hellish humanitarian catastrophe.
A peace roadmap from last year, which envisions power-sharing and cash transfers to the Houthis for public salaries, was shelved when the group began attacking Red Sea shipping in solidarity with the Palestinians, driving down shipping volumes through the crucial commercial waterway by half.
The Houthis would have to stop those as part of any peace deal.
Wider lens: The Saudis are keen to stabilize the Yemen situation. At the same time, Washington wants to keep Riyadh interested in normalizing ties with Israel as part of a deal that would include a US security guarantee and progress towards a Palestinian state.
But Saudi’s peace push is a gamble for Biden. “A deal would hand the Houthis basically everything they want,” says Gregory Brew, an Iran specialist at Eurasia Group. “Hard for Biden to spin that as a win, even if Red Sea commerce picks back up.”
Tribal supporters of Yemen's Houthis wave a Palestinian flag and hold up their firearms during a protest on recent U.S.-led strikes on Houthi targets, near Sanaa, Yemen January 14, 2024.
Houthis cause havoc in the Red Sea
Houthi rebels in Yemen took aim at a US-owned commercial ship, on Monday, launching a cruise missile at the Gibraltar Eagle in the Red Sea’s Gulf of Aden. The vessel, property of Eagle Bulk Shipping of Connecticut and flagged in the Marshall Islands, was carrying steel products. It suffered limited damage but no injuries and has now left the area.
This was just the latest salvo from the Yemen-based rebels, who on Sunday lobbed an anti-ship missile at the American destroyer USS Laboon. The strikes come in response to the US and UK bombing of over a dozen Houthi sites in Yemen last Thursday with warship- and submarine-launched Tomahawk missiles and fighter jets.
That operation put British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in the hot seat for failing to consult Parliament beforehand. Sunak said it had been “necessary to strike at speed ... to protect the security of these operations.” The Houthis had targeted the Royal Navy’s destroyer HMS Diamond, and while Sunak emphasized the strikes were a one-off, he did not rule out future engagement if British interests were again threatened. While supportive of Sunak’s decision, opposition politicians demanded transparency for any further military interventions.
In contrast to Israel’s campaign in Gaza, where it is on the ground alone, US efforts in the Red Sea have attracted the support of over 20 nations. Why the difference in the response? First, unlike in the densely populated territory of Gaza, strikes in the Red Sea and Yemen present little to no risk to civilian populations. But perhaps more importantly, while the Houthis may claim their actions are aimed at stopping Israel’s war with Hamas, most observers agree the rebels are advancing their own aims by disrupting global trade. They have carried out 27 attacks since Nov. 19.
“Operation Prosperity Guardian” seeks to safeguard the 12% of the world's shipping that passes through the Red Sea each year and is estimated to be worth one trillion dollars.
A missile is launched from a warship during the US-led coalition operation against military targets in Yemen on Jan. 12, 2024.
US and UK hit Houthi targets in Yemen
The US and UK launched strikes against military facilities in Houthi-controlled Yemen on Thursday in response to the rebel group’s attacks on commercial vessels in the Red Sea. The Houthis, who have carried out at least 27 attacks since November, since November, claim to be acting on behalf of Palestinians in response to Israel’s war against Hamas.
The Biden administration had warned of severe consequences if the Houthis did not halt the attacks. Thursday’s strikes, the first by the US against the Houthis in Yemen since 2016, hit more than a dozen sites used by the Iran-backed militants in the capital Sanaa, the port of Hodeidah, Dhamar, as well as Saada in the northwest. The Houthis said 73 strikes killed five people.
“Today, at my direction, US military forces – together with the United Kingdom and with support from Australia, Bahrain, Canada, and the Netherlands – successfully conducted strikes against a number of targets in Yemen used by Houthi rebels to endanger freedom of navigation in one of the world’s most vital waterways,” President Joe Biden said in a statement.
The move represents “a substantial increase in the severity of Western response,” says Clayton Allen, Eurasia Group’s US director, “but will not likely have eliminated all, or even most, of the Houthis’ capabilities.”
Some analysts have pointed to Washington’s track record in the region, noting that strikes against the Houthis in 2016 for their attacks on US military vessels forced the militants to stand down. But some fear that Thursday’s strikes, which come amid US efforts to prevent a wider regional war in the Middle East, could also have the opposite effect.
“The strikes could serve to increase the risk of escalation, and it is unlikely that this was the final round of deterrent actions by the US and allies,” Allen adds.
An Israeli tank fires towards Gaza, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, at the Israel-Gaza border, in southern Israel, December 27, 2023.
The war in Gaza has turned the Middle East into a powder keg
The risks of a regional war in the Middle East are rising, as a number of different actors with competing interests and historic rivalries become increasingly entangled amid the war in Gaza.
In the past week alone, President Joe Biden ordered strikes against an Iran-backed militia after several US troops were wounded in an attack in Iraq, the US shot down drones and missiles in the Red Sea launched by the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen, Iran accused Israel of killing a top general in Syria and vowed revenge, and Israel and Hezbollah continued trading fire – prompting Israeli officials to raise the possibility of invading Lebanon.
“We are now at a fork in the road: Either Hezbollah backs off from the Israeli border, in line with UN Resolution 1701, or we will push it away ourselves,” Eylon Levy, an Israeli government spokesperson, said Wednesday.
All of this is part of an escalating tit-for-tat between Iranian proxies, the US, and Israel that is intrinsically linked to the war in Gaza. Iran-backed militias have targeted US troops dozens of times since Oct. 7, while the Houthis have carried out a string of attacks on commercial vessels in the Red Sea. Iran’s proxies have been clear that their recent attacks on US forces, Israel, and other entities in the region are a direct response to the war in Gaza.
Meanwhile, there’s currently little hope for a halt in the fighting in Gaza, even a temporary one, despite global calls for a cease-fire as the death toll rises and the humanitarian crisis in the territory worsens. Egypt in recent days put forward an ambitious peace proposal, but neither Hamas nor Israel appear eager to embrace a lasting truce. Hamas is unwilling to give up control of Gaza and Israel is determined to destroy the militant group. Beyond Gaza, settler violence is increasing in the occupied West Bank.
Experts on the region warn that the worsening situation is a recipe for disaster.
It’s still “hard to predict when these tensions will get out of control and the region is plunged into an abyss,” Randa Slim, senior fellow and director of conflict resolution at the Middle East Institute, tweeted on Tuesday.
“At some point, one of the many parties that are involved in this conflict will miscalculate,” says Slim.
File Photo: The U.S. Navy guided-missile destroyer USS Mason pulls alongside a fleet replenishment oiler in the Atlantic Ocean, July 17, 2021.
American sailors arrest Houthi militants
Lost in the good news over a two-day extension of the humanitarian cease-fire in Gaza and the promised release of more captured civilians, is an event that could signal the rising risk of a broader Middle East war. On Sunday, a US warship captured five armed Houthi militants attempting to flee an Israeli-linked tanker they had briefly seized off the coast of Yemen. This is just the latest belligerent exchange between US forces and militants aligned with Iran. As in other cases, two missiles fired at the US ship from Houthi-controlled territory in Yemen looked more like a fist-shake than a serious attempt to hurt anyone.
But these incidents are likely to escalate as the Qatari-brokered cease-fire between Israel and Hamas ends in the coming days and the fighting intensifies sharply in southern Gaza. There is no evidence that Houthis and other Iranian proxies are following direct orders from Tehran, even if they share Iran’s view of the war. But if militants begin acting more aggressively on their own initiative, the risk of a deadly encounter that escalates the violence beyond Gaza will grow.
Iran thrives on Arab "misery," says expert Karim Sadjadpour
Whether it's Hamas in Gaza or Hezbollah in Lebanon or the Houthis in Yemen, how much control does Iran have over its proxy forces? According to Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, Karim Sadjadpour, Iran tends not to micromanage these groups. Iran may not typically give direct, day-to-day instructions but instead defer to these leaders to make their own decisions. However, Sadjadpour adds, on a broader level, Iran wields significant influence as they are often the primary source of funding and military support for these groups.
More importantly, when it comes to the people under the control of these proxy forces, whether they be Palestinian, Iraqi, Syrian, Yemeni or Lebanese, Iran doesn't care about their wellbeing. Sadjadpour emphasizes that we must distinguish between Iran being anti-Israel and genuinely pro-Palestinian, for instance. He recalls a conversation with an Iranian official who suggested that Iran benefits from the instability and conflict in the region, as it furthers their interests.
"Iran really benefits from the misery of these populations and these failing states, and they don't want to see these populations become prosperous" Sadjadpour tells Ian Bremmer in the latest episode of GZERO World. " And so in some ways, the more these populations experience conflict, whether it's, you know, conflict amongst themselves or direct conflict with Israel, Iran has tended to benefit from the despair of these Arab populations."
Watch the full interview: What’s Iran’s next move?
Catch GZERO World with Ian Bremmer every week at gzeromedia.com/gzeroworld or on US public television. Check local listings.
- What we know (and don't know) about Iran's role in the Israel-Hamas war ›
- US braces for Iran-backed blowback ›
- Fight between US and Iran’s proxies reaches boiling point ›
- Podcast: Iran's role in the Gaza war: is escalation inevitable? ›
- What’s Iran’s next move? ›
- US-Iran tensions complicate Biden's Middle East strategy - GZERO Media ›