Red Sea tensions simmer as all sides warn of possible further attacks

Photograph: Khaled Abdullah/Reuters

Tensions remained high in the Middle East on Sunday as western leaders, the Houthis and their allies all warned of possible further action in the aftermath of Friday’s US-UK bombing of rebel-held areas in Yemen.

As initial briefings from the US suggested that only about a quarter of the Houthis’ missile and drone attack capability had been destroyed, reports emerged of two boats trying to threaten a merchant ship in the southern Red Sea.

A Houthi spokesperson said on Sunday that the group’s attacks on merchant shipping travelling the busy waterway south of the Suez Canal would continue “because they are at war with Israel”.

Hussain al-Bukhaiti said that if the US and UK continued to bomb Yemen, Houthi forces would attack western warships “maybe using hundreds of drones and missiles,” which would represent a significant escalation. Not all the ships targeted since the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October have had Israeli links.

The UK foreign secretary, David Cameron, told the BBC the west was “prepared to back our words with actions” should Houthi attacks continue, while the US and UK warships remained on high alert in the region.

The leader of Hezbollah, a Houthi ally, said all ships in the southern Red Sea were now in danger. Hassan Nasrallah said the US bombing on Friday “will harm the security of all maritime navigation” because “the sea has become a theatre of fighting, missiles, drones and warships”.

Britain’s Maritime Trade Operations (MTO), a monitoring body, said there had been a report of two small boats approaching a merchant vessel and seeking to persuade it to change course 23 nautical miles north-west of the Eritrean port of Assab in the southern Red Sea, an area where previous Houthi raids have taken place.

The incident, which took place at 12.15pm UK time, appeared to have been relatively minor, according to the MTO’s initial report. The vessel received reassurance it would be protected and decided to maintain course, prompting the unidentified small craft to abandon their harassment and sail away.

Recent events in and around Yemen come as Israel’s war with Hamas passed the 100-day mark and at a time when tensions in the Middle East have been at their highest in decades. Cameron said it was “hard to think of a time when there has been so much danger and insecurity and instability in the world” and that the “lights are absolutely flashing red”.

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said late on Saturday that his country would pursue its war against Hamas relentlessly and would not be halted by the international court of justice, which has begun hearing a case brought by South Africa accusing it of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

“No one will stop us, not The Hague, not the axis of evil and not anyone else,” Netanyahu said in televised remarks, referring to Iran and its allied militias, the Houthis and Hezbollah.

Nearly 24,000 Palestinians been killed in Gaza so far, according to the territory’s health ministry, of whom 70% are women and children. An estimated 1.9 million people out of a prewar population of 2.3 million have been displaced, fleeing intense fighting and bombing across the strip.

Concerns are intensifying about the risks of wider escalation. Two recent Israeli assassinations of Hezbollah commanders in Lebanon have increased fears of an outbreak of war in the north of the country while the security situation in the southern Red Sea has rapidly deteriorated.

A fleet of US and British warships were embroiled a Houthi drone and missile attack last Tuesday. Eighteen drones and three missiles were shot down, including seven drones by the Royal Navy’s HMS Diamond, prompting the US president, Joe Biden, to respond by bombing Houthi targets in the small hours of Friday.

British and US warships and jets fired 150 missiles at what the Pentagon described as military targets in 28 locations, killing five people and injuring six. The bombing was intended to halt a spate of 26 Houthi attacks since mid-October by targeted radar stations and missile and drone launch sites.

Western leaders and sources suggested the bombing had only partly reduced the Houthi’s ability to launch attacks. US officials briefed late on Friday to the New York Times that the strikes had affected 20 to 30% of the Houthis’ offensive capability, partly because drone launchers are highly mobile.

Cameron made a similarly cautious assessment. “Our joint action will have gone some way to degrade Houthi capabilities,” he wrote in the Sunday Telegraph, emphasising that the Yemeni rebels were supported by Iran, which has supplied the group with weaponry during the country’s nine-year civil war.

China said it was deeply concerned about the military escalation in the Red Sea. The country’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, said Beijing “calls for a halt to the harassment and attacks on civilian ships” but also indirectly accused the US and the UK of inflaming the situation with their bombing.

“The adding of fuel to the fire of tensions in the Red Sea should be avoided and an increase in the overall security risk of the region should be prevented,” Wang said on a visit to Egypt in remarks aimed at Washington and London, although he did not name either country directly.

Western leaders and militaries are monitoring to see whether the Houthis will back off from attacking shipping in the busy Red Sea, through which an estimated 15% of world’s maritime trade flows, or defiantly launch another major attack as threatened by the group’s leader, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, last week.

Farea Al-Muslimi, a Yemeni expert and research fellow at the Chatham House thinktank, said he believed the Houthis may be prepared to escalate if they are able to after last week’s bombing, given their longstanding hostility to Israel and the west.

“The strikes will not stop the Houthis from further attacks in the Red Sea. If anything, rather the opposite,” he said, adding that the group may also strike US and UK military bases across the Arabian peninsula using longer-range missiles.