Two Saudi oil tankers burned in the Red Sea on Thursday after the Houthis said they had attacked them, turning Bab el-Mandeb into another pressure point in a war built on blockades, airstrikes, and control of trade routes. No casualties were reported, but the message was clear enough: when states and armed factions fight over Yemen, it’s ordinary shipping, oil flows, and workers on the water who get shoved into the blast radius.
Who Pays for the Power Games
The Iran-backed rebels said they had closed the Bab el-Mandeb Strait to Saudi-linked shipping in retaliation for the kingdom’s blockade on Yemen and a recent attack on the international airport in Yemen’s rebel-held capital, Sanaa. Saudi’s state-run news agency reported a fire on a tanker in the Red Sea following an attack, as did the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations Center. The Houthis said the closure targeted vessels connected to Saudi Arabia or going in and out of its Red Sea ports. That’s the hierarchy in plain sight: rulers and armed groups make their moves, and the costs land on everyone else moving cargo through the water.
Bab el-Mandeb sits at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula and connects the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden. Around 12% of the world’s trade, including a fourth of global container traffic, passes through the narrows. More than 7 million barrels of petroleum a day transited the strait in June, compared to around 4 million before the Iran war, Allison Minor, the director of the Atlantic Council’s Project for Middle East Integration, wrote in an analysis published this week. Saudi Arabia has been recently exporting some 4 million barrels of oil a day through its Red Sea port of Yanbu, blunting the impact of the Strait of Hormuz closure, which has still rattled economies around the world.
The Chokepoint Logic
The threat alone can do damage. During a similar blockade announced against Israel over the war in Gaza, the rebels attacked many vessels with little or no connection to that conflict, and the warning itself helped keep international shippers away from the route. International shippers could reroute around the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa, as they did at the height of the war in Gaza, but that adds one or two weeks to voyages and raises costs. Saudi Arabia could still get crude to market without using Bab el-Mandeb by shipping up to 2.5 million barrels a day across the Red Sea to Egypt, whose SUMED pipeline can carry it to the Mediterranean. It could also ship 1 million barrels a day through the Suez Canal.
Three Houthi officials told The Associated Press on Tuesday that the group has planned for months how to disrupt shipping in the strait. Those plans include the use of naval mines, explosive-laden boats, drones and helicopters to allow fighters to board ships, the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to media. They said vessels would first be warned not to cross designated boundaries in the strait. If ships ignore the warnings, the Houthis would resort to military action.
That’s not a spontaneous flare-up. It’s organized disruption aimed at a route that carries the world’s commerce, with the people below deck and the crews on the water left to absorb the risk.
States, Militias, and the Same Old Trap
In the Strait of Hormuz, Iran has shown that even sporadic attacks on ships can be enough to effectively close a critical waterway by driving up risks and insurance premiums. Clionadh Raleigh, the founder of ACLED, a conflict monitoring service, said, “If Bab el-Mandeb comes under pressure at the same time as shipping in the Gulf, you have disruption around two of the world’s most important maritime routes at once.”
The Houthis attacked over 100 vessels at the height of the war in Gaza, before a punishing U.S. and Israeli air campaign put an end to the attacks in early 2025. Asked about the attack on the Saudi tanker in the Red Sea on Thursday, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said: “I hope they’ll stop. They shouldn’t really do that.” Speaking during a regional summit in the Philippines, he said that “I think the Houthis, frankly, got snookered into this thing by the Iranians. And they were smart to stay out of it, and they should stay out of it and they should stop.”
The language changes. The machinery doesn’t. Saudi Arabia’s military says it will keep Bab el-Mandeb open. “All Houthi threats against transiting vessels will be dealt with swiftly and firmly, as such threats are a blatant violation of international law and fall under acts of maritime piracy,” said Maj. Gen. Turki al-Malki, a Saudi military spokesperson. That’s the state speaking in the voice of order while threatening force to preserve the routes that keep oil and trade moving.
Yemen’s civil war began in 2014 when the rebels seized the capital, Sanaa, and much of northern Yemen, forcing the government into exile. Saudi Arabia led an international coalition fighting the rebels and also imposed an air and sea blockade on Houthi-held parts of Yemen that eased in recent years. Major fighting ended with a truce in 2022, but the structure of siege and retaliation never really disappeared.
The Houthis say Saudi Arabia struck the airport in Sanaa earlier this month in an attempt to stop a flight carrying Houthi leaders back from Iran, where they had attended the funeral of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The plane landed safely at another airport. The Houthis then launched missiles and drones at Saudi Arabia’s Abha International Airport in the most significant confrontation in years.
Ahmed Nagi, a senior Yemen analyst at the International Crisis Group, said the threat to Saudi Arabia also benefits the Houthis’ ally, Iran, at a time when the U.S. has resumed daily airstrikes. “From Iran’s perspective, opening additional pressure points across the region gives it more leverage,” Nagi said. “The Houthis provide Tehran with influence over one of the world’s most important maritime chokepoints.”
No one in this chain of command is talking about the people who actually move the goods, crew the ships, or live under the blockades. They’re just the ones who get to pay when the powerful decide the sea is another battlefield.