February 27, 2025: The Iran-backed Houthi militia in Yemen has since November 2023 been trying to block commercial ships from reaching the Suez Canal, by whacking them with ballistic missiles and large armed drones. Yemen is at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, which has the Persian Gulf on its east coast and the Red Sea on the west coast. Ships which don’t go through the Suez Canal have to make a much longer journey all the way around the south coast of Africa. A lot more merchant vessels are making that journey due to the very high cost of war risk insurance in going through the Red Sea, which is now an official war zone. On the plus side, the need for so many more ships to make this long journey instead of going shorter way though the Suez Canal required a ten percent increase in the container ship fleet. Fortunately, there was an eleven percent surplus of these long ships and now nearly all of them are at work.

The Houthis say they are at war with Israel and still fire at ships more or less at random, though they contend they only fire on ships serving Israel. So far over 200 ships have been attacked and about 20 percent of them were damaged.

The U.S. Navy sent a carrier task force to launch air strikes on Houthi targets with predictable minor effects. That led to more frequent and aggressive attacks which reduced Houthi activity. These attacks used over 200 missiles and as many shells from 127mm or five inch guns on destroyers. Several of those 127mm shells actually shot down Houthi drones.

In 2024, one of the Houthi drones hit a building in the Israeli city of Tel Aviv, killing one civilian and wounding several others. The next day, Israel sent F-15 and F-35 fighter-bombers to destroy several economic targets in the Yemen Red Sea port of Hudaydah. This is where weapons arrive from Iran for the Houthis to use against Red Sea shipping. The airstrikes destroyed fuel storage sites as well as port facilities, including the difficult-to-replace ship unloading cranes. If the Israelis leave the port alone, repair of these facilities could take up to a year. The Israelis and other nations are not leaving the port of Hudaydah alone as long as the Houthis are using it.

Yemen’s Shia rebels, led by the Houthi tribe, have used their large stockpile of Iranian missiles to try and block access to the Suez Canal. This capability developed over the last decade as the rebels launched attacks on more distant targets. The rebels obtained more powerful weapons as well, including Iranian ballistic missiles, which were disassembled so they could be smuggled from Iran to Yemen, where Iranian technicians supervised the missiles being assembled and launched into Saudi Arabia. In the last few years, the rebels have received longer range ballistic missiles fired from northern Yemen across Saudi territory to hit Saudi and UAE oil production facilities on the Persian Gulf coast. The rebels also acquired the reconnaissance capability to accurately fire missiles at ships passing through the narrow, 26 kilometers wide, Bab-el-Mandeb straits off southwestern Yemen and force ships to take the longer and more expensive and time-consuming 6,000 kilometers route around the southern tip of Africa that takes up to fourteen days.

These attacks have always been a potential threat to ships using the Red Sea to reach the Suez Canal in Egypt, at the north end of the Red Sea. Transit fees from ships using the canal are a major source of income for Egypt, bringing in about $10 billion a year. Egypt and Iran are enemies and reducing Suez Canal income is a win for Iran, which supported the Yemen rebels for more than a decade to make such an interdiction possible.

Western nations reacted slowly to this interdiction effort but by the end of 2024 were launching regular airstrikes on Houthi targets, coordinating their efforts with the Israelis and U.S. carrier task forces operation in the region. In October 2024 American B-2 bombers dropped penetrating bombs on Houthi underground facilities, destroying missile stockpiles and headquarters for the rebels. This reduced the number of missiles available. This was seen in lower frequency of attacks. A naval blockade of Yemen was tightened, with more frequent inspection of fishing boats and coastal freighters.

Western warships close to the Yemen shore continue using their defensive weapons to defeat attacks launched from the Yemen coast. The United States currently has several destroyers based off Yemen.