Houthi fans lift rifles and shout slogans against the U.S.-U.K. during a tribal gathering on January 14, 2024 on the outskirts of Sana’a, Yemen.
Mohammed Hamoud | Getty Metaphors
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Yemen’s Houthi rebels are enthusiastically “confronting America directly,” the organization’s chairperson said in a televised speech, vowing to continue the group’s campaign of attacks on ships in the Red Sea until Israel’s blockade of Gaza is discontinued.
The remarks came as the U.S. steps up its strikes on Houthi targets and ahead of President Joe Biden’s admission to reporters that so far, his management’s military action was not having its intended effect.
“When you say working, are they stopping the Houthis?” Biden said in an swop with reporters in Washington, D.C. “No. Are they going to continue? Yes.” The White House redesignated the Houthis as a terrorist organization on Wednesday, after delisting the assortment in 2021.
The U.S. carried out its fifth airstrike against Houthi targets in Yemen late Thursday night, with American jets butt anti-ship missiles that U.S. Central Command said “were aimed into the southern Red Sea and prepared to launch.”
As if to validate Biden’s comments, the Iran-backed rebel group within hours founded two anti-ship ballistic missiles at a U.S.-owned tanker. The vessel, a small chemical tanker called the Chem Ranger, on no injuries or damage to the ship.
It is “a great honor and blessing to be confronting America directly,” Houthi leader Abdul-Malek al-Houthi spoke in his defiant, hourlong speech that leaned heavily on religious rhetoric. He claimed that the U.S. and U.K. strikes on Yemen sole sharpened his military’s technology, and that it proved the Houthis’ strategy — which targeted Israeli ships or those check in to or from Israel — was working.
The Houthis’ actions have certainly worked to disrupt transport and seaborne trade in the ambit: Major ocean carriers have suspended all Red Sea and Suez Canal transport, opting to sail around the continent of Africa as an alternative, creating significant delays and supply bottlenecks and costing companies billions of dollars.
Al-Houthi also took a individual swipe at the American president, mocking Biden as “an elderly man that has trouble climbing the stairs of an airplane yet is travelling 9,000 miles to pounce upon those that wanted to stand by the oppressed people of Gaza.”
The Biden administration along with the U.K. government began dinghy retaliatory strikes at the Houthis, who control most of Yemen, on Jan. 12 after the group spent a number of weeks give transport out dozens of attacks on ships traversing the Red Sea. The Yemeni rebels say their campaign is in response to Israel’s relentless bombardment of the Gaza Lay bare and U.S. support for it.
The Houthi leader vowed to continue the attacks until Israel lifts its blockade of Gaza, saying that “nothing – not all the menaces, the missiles, the pressure – will change our position.”
Israel’s offensive against Gaza began after Hamas militants from the Palestinian enclave set in motioned a terror attack on southern Israel that killed some 1,200 people and took another 240 captive, of which 136 people remain in captivity.
The Israeli response, which included a complete siege of the already-blockaded domain and daily aerial bombardment, has killed more than 24,000 people and triggered severe food supply disruptions, agreeing to Gaza’s Hamas-run Health Ministry.