The Houthis Took Mocha, the Red Sea Is Now the Second Strait in Play, and Two Ships Were Hit Off Oman Overnight

Saudi Arabia answered with some forty airstrikes across Taiz, Hodeidah, al-Jawf and Marib. Houthi fire into the kingdom, which had already wounded seventy-three civilians this week, was what took the matter to the UN Security Council on Thursday evening.

At the United Nations

Bahrain's ambassador, Jamal Alrowaiei, spoke for all six Gulf states: "We affirm that these continued attacks would constitute a serious escalation and direct threat to the security and stability of the region and its peoples." The UN's envoy for Yemen, Hans Grundberg, told the council that the country faced "its gravest risk of full-scale war since the 2022 truce", that "this renewed war should alarm us all", and that its consequences would not stop at Yemen's borders, The National reported. Rashad al-Alimi, who chairs the Presidential Leadership Council, said Bab al-Mandeb "cannot become another Strait of Hormuz" and that protecting Yemen's coast was "a shared Arab and international interest". The United States said the Houthis were acting as Iran's proxies. Pakistan warned that its defence pact with Saudi Arabia could be activated if the attacks on the kingdom continued. A Yemen specialist at the Royal United Services Institute told Geographical the situation was "spiralling out of control".

Khasab, the same night

At 19.10 UTC on Thursday, a little after eleven at night in the Gulf, the UK Maritime Trade Operations centre issued Warning 133-26: four unidentified projectiles had struck two vessels about four nautical miles west of Khasab, the Omani port on the Musandam peninsula that looks across the narrowest part of Hormuz. One vessel was on fire. The master of a third ship, six miles off, watched it happen. UKMTO did not name the ships or attribute the attack, and Gulf News reported no casualty figures. Separately, Iran's Revolutionary Guards said their navy had destroyed a US "Saildrone-type" unmanned vessel in the strait, "thwarting its aggressive mission". Khasab sits inside the Omani corridor that Iran declared open to shipping when it announced its restricted zone last week. If ships in that corridor are being hit, the corridor does not mean much.

What it means

Two things, neither good. First, the relief valve is now under threat. Saudi Arabia has moved crude west by pipeline and shipped it from the Red Sea precisely because Hormuz is closed; a Houthi presence at both ends of the Yemeni coast puts that route within range of the same weapons that shut the Red Sea to container lines in 2024, which we covered at the time in our report on Gulf supply chains. Second, the war has a second front with its own logic. The Houthis do not need Tehran's instruction to press an advantage against a government that has just lost its Red Sea port, and Riyadh, which spent years extracting itself from Yemen, is now bombing it again. Oil's fall on Friday, to a little above 104 dollars for Brent, priced the American rate rise and not this. The Monday open will price this.