Houthi forces seize Yemen's Red Sea coast, reaching the Bab al-Mandab strait

Iran-aligned Houthi fighters completed an 18-hour sweep across Yemen's Red Sea coastline on Friday, capturing the volcanic island that sits at the narrowest point of the Bab al-Mandab strait and extending their reach over a waterway that carries roughly a tenth of the world's seaborne trade. Government-aligned forces withdrew from Mayyun Island, also called Perim, a day after losing the port city of Mokha, according to Yemeni officials cited by NBC News and confirmed separately by security sources who spoke to Reuters.

The advance also swept up the coastal towns of Dhubab and Murad and the Zuqar and Hanish island groups further south. Taken together, it gives the Houthi movement — which already controls northern Yemen and the capital, Sanaa — physical presence on both Yemeni shores of the strait for the first time in the conflict. It lands seven months into the wider war between the United States and Iran and weeks after Iranian forces intensified their blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, meaning two of the world's most consequential oil and container chokepoints now sit under some degree of hostile control at the same time.

The numbers

Bab al-Mandab funnels an estimated 10 to 12 percent of global seaborne trade and roughly a third of Europe-Asia container traffic toward the Suez Canal. Brent crude jumped more than 6 percent on Thursday, touching just above $108 a barrel for the first time since May, after Saudi Arabia shut down its East-West pipeline — the kingdom's main overland bypass for the Hormuz bottleneck — following a drone strike that Riyadh's foreign ministry said was launched from Iraq. The pipeline normally carries up to 5 million barrels a day to the Red Sea port of Yanbu.

On the ground, the International Organization for Migration reported that at least 46,000 people had been displaced across Yemen's West Coast and Taiz governorates since the offensive began roughly a week earlier, a figure the agency said was "rising by the hour." That is more than double the roughly 18,500 the IOM had counted just three days before. Entire villages in Taiz's Maqbanah, Jabal Habashi and Al Ma'afer districts emptied out, and Houthi forces claimed to have downed nine aircraft and killed, captured or wounded hundreds of opposing troops during the push, a figure that has not been independently verified.

How the front collapsed

The seizure caps a rupture that had been building for months. A UN-brokered truce, technically expired since 2022 but informally observed along most front lines, had kept large-scale fighting between the Houthis and the Saudi-backed government largely frozen even as the group launched intermittent missile and drone strikes tied to the Gaza war and, this year, to the widening Iran war. UN Special Envoy for Yemen Hans Grundberg told the Security Council last month that Yemen faced its most serious risk of relapse into large-scale conflict since that truce took hold, warning that Red Sea attacks on shipping risked "deepening Yemen's entanglement with the wider regional confrontation."

That warning proved prescient. Government forces, stretched thin and reportedly short on ammunition and air cover after Saudi Arabia redirected attention to its own defense following Houthi strikes that wounded dozens inside the kingdom this month, gave up Mokha with comparatively little resistance. Analysts say the Houthis, which Western officials say receive weapons, training and targeting support from Iran's Revolutionary Guard, timed the push to exploit both that weakness and Tehran's interest in opening a second maritime front while it remains at war with Washington. Tehran's state media described the advance as a "resounding victory" for its regional allies.

Who is affected

The immediate toll falls hardest on Yemeni civilians already worn down by more than a decade of war. Beyond the tens of thousands newly displaced, the United Nations said it was alarmed that Houthi fighters had taken over a humanitarian compound in Mokha, insisting that aid premises and staff "must be respected and protected at all times." Farea al-Muslimi, a Yemen specialist at Chatham House, said the fighting was producing "two new crises" at once: a fresh wave of internal displacement and rising commodity prices for a population where the World Health Organization had already logged dozens of deaths and hundreds of injuries from fighting in August alone.

Beyond Yemen's borders, the exposure is commercial and diplomatic. Container lines and tanker operators that had cautiously begun returning to the Red Sea after a lull in Houthi attacks now face renewed pressure to reroute around the Cape of Good Hope, adding roughly two weeks to Asia-Europe voyages and pushing up freight and insurance costs. Saudi Arabia, whose East-West pipeline has become the last major overland alternative to the blocked Strait of Hormuz, is newly exposed on a second front, since the pipeline's Red Sea terminal at Yanbu lies within reach of the same coastline the Houthis now partly control.

"Families are being forced to flee for the second or third time in this conflict, with almost nothing left. As fighting spreads, reaching people with lifesaving assistance is becoming harder," said Amy Pope, director general of the International Organization for Migration.

Reaction

Houthi military spokesman Yahya Saree said in a statement that "maritime navigation is safe for all companies except Saudi ships," which the group says it will continue targeting "until the aggression stops" — a distinction shipping analysts say offers little practical comfort, since insurers price war risk across an entire strait rather than by flag. Andreas Krieg, a security analyst at King's College London, said that even short of full sovereign control of the waterway, the Houthis' hold on the surrounding ports and islands gives them "a dramatically stronger ability to contest, threaten and potentially deny commercial use" of the strait, calling it "an extraordinary shock to the global trading system" layered on top of the Hormuz disruption.

Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman pressed the White House to strike Houthi positions directly, according to officials cited by NBC News, but the Trump administration has so far limited its response to intelligence-sharing and targeting assistance rather than direct military action, wary of opening a third active front alongside the Iran war. The European Union's naval mission in the area, Operation Aspides, has a mandate confined to escorting merchant vessels and defending them at sea; its own charter, published by the European External Action Service, states explicitly that the mission "will not conduct any strikes on land," leaving it with no tool to contest the Houthis' territorial gains directly.

What happens next

Diplomats expect the UN Security Council to convene again on Yemen within days, building on emergency consultations Council members held this week, though a binding response is considered unlikely given Russian and Chinese reluctance to escalate sanctions on the Houthis while the wider Iran war continues. Analysts caution that holding ports is not the same as controlling a strait: the western shore of Bab al-Mandab belongs to Djibouti and Eritrea, and Combined Maritime Forces and Operation Aspides vessels continue to patrol its international waters. Even so, as Al Jazeera reported, the calculus for shipowners has shifted from managing episodic missile risk to weighing a chokepoint where an armed, Iran-aligned force now controls the eastern approach outright. With Saudi Arabia's pipeline still shut and Hormuz traffic already constrained, oil traders and insurers are treating the coming days as a test of whether the Houthis intend to enforce their stated ban on Saudi shipping — and whether that enforcement spills over into attacks on other flags moving through the strait.