Blowback From Gaza: Geopolitics of the Houthi Red Sea Campaign

Since October 2023, attacks by Yemen’s Houthi militants against civilian shipping in the Red Sea have created havoc along one of the world’s busiest maritime trade routes. These attacks have produced the third major disruption to global supply chains since 2020, coming on the heels of interruptions arising from the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Shipping firms — particularly those with ties to Israel or its allies in the United States and Europe — have been forced to reroute their vessels around the southern tip of Africa, adding costs and delays to cargoes. This issue brief examines the strategic and economic significance of the Houthi attacks, which have been motivated by the war in Gaza and abetted by geopolitical shifts in the region.

It also summarizes a discussion — hosted by the Baker Institute Middle East Energy Roundtable in May 2024 —led by the following experts:

• Elisabeth Kendall, president of Girton College at the University of Cambridge.
• Mohammed Ayatollahi Tabaar, fellow for the Middle East at the Baker Institute.
• Christian Dwyer, shipping and offshore specialist and partner at Schjødt.
• The Honorable David M. Satterfield, director of the Baker Institute.

The following key points emerged from their discussion:

• Iran and the Houthis have formed a strategic alliance aimed at entrenching Iran’s influence as a military power with sea-based capabilities. Iran’s partnership with the Houthis serves multiple purposes, including enhancing Iran’s strategic depth in regional conflicts and providing a retaliatory capability against potential seizures of Iranian oil tankers. 
   
• The Houthis’ strategic use of maritime attacks is a means to enhance their soft power nationally and internationally. They seek to gain domestic political capital in hopes of solidifying their control over Yemen, which underscores their willingness to leverage regional conflicts, such as the ongoing war in Gaza, and to cause maritime disruptions. 
   
• The Houthis have successfully weathered interventions by U.S.-backed regional powers, such as the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia, which now seek to accommodate rather than confront the Houthis in Yemen. 
   
• International efforts, such as Operation Prosperity Guardian, aim to counter Houthi attacks but face challenges in achieving long-term regional stability. Egypt is experiencing deep economic repercussions from the attacks, affecting economic lifelines, such as the Suez Canal, and causing concern for partners, such as the UAE and Saudi Arabia.

Who Are the Houthis?

The Houthi movement, officially named “Ansar Allah” (“Supporters of God”), is a political, military, and religious group that emerged in northern Yemen in the 1990s. Religiously, the Houthis belong to the Zaydi branch of Shia Islam — though they rely more on the “Malazim” (“Fascicles”), a lengthy work written by Hussein al-Houthi, which is the foundational text of the Houthi ideology and increasingly drawn upon as a holy text. 

While the Zaydis did have some status as an “imamate,” or state, in north Yemen from 1918 to 1962, their territory was only a small corner of present-day northwest Yemen, and their rule was fractious. Hussein al-Houthi founded the modern Houthi movement in the 1990s and led it until his death in 2004. Leadership then passed to his brother Abdul-Malik al-Houthi. The Zaydis had faced economic, political, and religious marginalization in the decades after the fall of the imamate in 1962, which eventually spiraled into a series of wars in 2004 until the Arab Spring erupted. During that time, the Houthis led six rounds of fighting against the Yemeni government, and, in the last round of conflict during 2009–10, Saudi Arabia became involved in response to a Houthi cross-border incursion.

Motivated by dissatisfaction with their treatment during the U.N.-led National Dialogue Conference that followed the ousting of Yemen’s long-serving President Ali Abdullah Saleh in February 2012, the Houthis assumed a governance role in Yemen through the capture of the capital city Sana’a in September 2014. The city’s seizure pushed Saudi Arabia to become further involved and enter the conflict at the head of an Arab coalition, internationalizing a civil war. Today, two thirds of Yemen’s population live in Houthi-controlled areas. Within Yemen, the Houthis established two governing bodies in 2016: the Supreme Political Council, which functions as an executive body, and the National Salvation Government. The Houthis initially gained popularity on a ticket of championing common grievances by promising to address corruption and protect the masses against the removal of fuel subsidies. Most recently, they have drawn global attention for their attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea in support of Palestine.

Houthi Links With Iran

Supporting the Houthis is part of Iran’s grand strategy to establish itself as a sea-based military power in the region and beyond in order to protect its flow of oil exports under sanctions. According to Iranian analysts, the Houthis did not garner Iran’s attention and support until they performed well on the battlefield in the initial stages of the war with Saudi Arabia in 2015, after which the partnership was consolidated. Through the Houthis’ strategic position in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, Iran is seeking to gain leverage in regional conflicts, counter U.S. pressure in the region, circumvent U.S. sanctions, and retaliate if its oil tankers are seized in the Red Sea, Indian Ocean, or other areas. At the time, Iran appeared to have concluded that the U.S. sanctions levied against it were likely permanent. Given Iran’s goal to preserve its nuclear infrastructure and status as a nuclear threshold state, the possibility of a new U.S.-Iran agreement remains low, even with the election of a new Iranian president in July 2024. 

The Iran-Houthi relationship can be seen from two different perspectives. On the one hand, as their benefactors, Iran has enormous influence over the Houthis. For instance, Houthi attacks against civilian and infrastructure targets in Saudi Arabia have not resumed since the Iran-Saudi agreement to restore diplomatic relations in March 2023. 

On the other hand, the agency of Iran’s proxies has been overlooked. A decade ago, the Houthis were considered a tribe from the mountains being used by Iran, but they have proved to be adept students: They have provided sites where Iran can manage its radars and missiles and have been trained by the Iranians to hide and operate sophisticated missile systems. While they still rely on technical support from Iran, should there come a day when Iran is no longer part of the equation, the Houthis’ capacities for sophisticated attack will remain. Furthermore, the Houthis have not always heeded Iran in the past, including the Houthi capture of Sana’a in 2014, which was against Iranian advice and stemmed from an agreement with Yemen’s ousted former President Ali Abdullah Saleh. 

More recently, Houthi actions have shaped the regional dynamics of the war in Gaza. Iran’s retaliatory missile and drone barrage against Israel after the attack on the Iranian embassy in Damascus in early April 2024 was reportedly inspired partly by Houthi and Hezbollah skepticism of Iran’s resolve to confront Israel. Nevertheless, the current attacks on maritime targets in the Red Sea are undoubtedly coordinated with Iran to ensure that nothing deviates from Iran’s intent. 

The Iran-Houthi relationship must be understood as a two-way street, wherein Iran has the upper-handed influence to force the Houthi to reduce their operations in the Red Sea, but the Houthis have a certain amount of power to shape Iranian policies and action as well.

Houthi Attacks on Shipping

The Red Sea is one of the world’s most critical transport waterways. Almost 15% of global seaborne trade passes through the area, including 30% of the world’s container traffic, 12% of the world’s oil traded by sea, and 8% of the world’s liquified natural gas (LNG). Although the international shipping community has previously worked in rapidly shifting and challenging environments, the ongoing and escalating attacks by the Houthis pose a threat so complex and difficult that the world’s great powers have been unable to thwart it.

In November 2023, the Houthis stated their intention to attack Israeli-linked shipping vessels to hit back at what they saw as the disproportionate nature of Israeli strikes on Gaza after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel. Much of the information leveraged by the Houthis to choose appropriate targets among ships traveling along its coasts is publicly available through online marine traffic databases, but there have been a few instances of misinformation and accidental strikes upon ships from nonaligned countries. The first documented Houthi attack on civilian shipping occurred on Nov. 19, 2023, when the Houthis hijacked a vehicle carrier, detaining and holding the crew to this day. Since then, more than 40 vessels have been attacked in various capacities, resulting in the deaths of three crewmen in March 2024. 

Shipping has sharply decreased in the Red Sea since the attacks began, with many ships, particularly those affiliated with Israel, the U.S., or Western European countries, rerouting to the Cape of Good Hope, which adds two weeks of transit time and increases fuel costs. The risk of attack has increased war risk premiums by as much as 250% for Israeli-affiliated vessels, as well as for crew costs and freight rates. Which vessels make the crossing, knowing the risks, depends on each vessel’s contract, whether it contains a war clause and whether the owner is willing to pay the steeply increased war premium.

Ships that do proceed through the Red Sea are able to implement Best Management Practice (BMP) 5, a series of procedures developed to counter Somali piracy in the 2000s, which were successful in mitigating those threats but are not designed to defend against missiles and drones. Some ships have acquired armed guards and liaised with naval task forces, and many have turned off their tracking devices or flagged them with messages, such as “not with Israel,” the latter as a signal to the Houthis that they are unaffiliated with Israel and should be permitted to transit the area. 

In December 2023, an international coalition led by the U.S. and U.K. launched Operation Prosperity Guardian to counter the Houthi attacks, and has been followed by other operations, including air strikes conducted by the countries spurring this effort. Although the campaign has been perceived as partly successful, the attacks remain ongoing, and the shipping community has been forced to adapt to the risk. In July, Israel launched an airstrike on the Houthi-controlled Red Sea port of Al Hudaydah in response to a Houthi drone attack on Tel Aviv, which killed one person.

Motivations for Houthi Attacks and Potential Deterrents

There are several possible motivations for the maritime attacks by the Houthis. The group continues to need resources, including access to ports and shipments of food and fuel. However, these considerations are eclipsed by the soft power they stand to gain. The nine-year war in Yemen has reached a fragile stalemate since the official truce between the Houthis and the Saudi-led military coalition expired in late 2022, but internally the Houthis’ position has started to unravel in areas under their control. While this violent campaign is nominally motivated to help Palestine and aligns with the Houthis’ longstanding denunciation of Jews, Israel, and the U.S., there is an undercurrent of opportunism that the Houthis have seized upon since late 2023. 

Supporting Gaza and challenging the West in the process has increased the Houthis’ popularity domestically and internationally, where they are being referred to increasingly as the legitimate leaders of Yemen. The Houthis’ anti-shipping campaign has been augmented by the group’s clever and successful use of social media messaging, often using catchy music video shorts, including songs in support of the Palestinian cause. These have been broadly circulated in and beyond the Arab world and appear as a source of Houthi soft power. The U.S. or its allies may be wary of directly attacking the Houthis at this point as these actions might further legitimize and popularize the Houthi movement, while destroying the existing, albeit tenuous, stalemate on the ground in Yemen.

Concurrently, Iran, which does not wish to initiate an all-out confrontation with Israel, has been able to use the Houthis as a low-risk way to express their own support for Hamas. Yemen is far enough geographically from Israel that most Houthi missiles provided by Iran have not been able to cause serious damage, although that was beginning to change in July 2024. Earlier, some minimally destructive missiles reached Aqaba and territory on the Jordanian and Egyptian sides of the Israeli border with Eilat. These strikes are understood symbolically, as a way for Iran to raise or lower degrees of signaling a threat without actually fearing direct reprisal from Israel.

As far as solutions go, a cease-fire in Gaza could lead to a halt in Houthi — and Hezbollah — attacks although some analysts reject this claim. Houthi supporters including Iran would be unlikely to support continued attacks on shipping after cease-fire is in place. In the long-term, if the Houthis began a similar campaign down the road, it might not produce the same domestic and regional popularity, as ultimately the disruption in the Red Sea negatively impacts local audiences and reduces aid flows as well. 

Regional Considerations

In order to thoroughly understand the Yemen conflict and current attacks, it is important to keep in mind the regional context. Several regional actors have instrumentalized the war in Yemen for their own purposes since the initial internationalization of the conflict in 2015. 

United Arab Emirates (UAE)

The UAE initially entered the conflict in coalition with Saudi Arabia in March 2015. Abu Dhabi’s then-Crown Prince — and president of the UAE since 2022 — Mohamed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan saw Emirati participation as a way to cement a relationship and a degree of influence over the emerging leader of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman Al-Saud, which would extend into the future. The campaign proved to be very challenging for those involved, including the UAE, whose president faced criticism domestically from other Emirati leaders for the exposure and international reputational damage sustained by the casualties in the Yemen war.

By 2019, the UAE began to pull back from Yemen, as they had also done in other areas of the Middle East, such as Libya, where they had intervened in post-Arab Spring dynamics, and pivot to a more conservative and sustainable stance. However, the UAE did not withdraw completely from Yemen and maintains economic interests and an indirect presence in southern Yemen and the broader Red Sea region. 

The other significant motivation for UAE engagement in Yemen is an attempt to establish, preserve, and increase Emirati ability to exploit the Marib-Jawf oil fields as well as the pipeline that leads from these fields to the Indian Ocean and to establish a form of political influence over the territory previously occupied by the Hadhramaut Governorate, which the Emiratis believed would emerge once again as a successor to the former People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (1967–90). The consolidation of these economic interests is exemplified in Emirati disinterest in the old Yemen Arab Republic in the north and their concentration of efforts on the territory they maintain around the Marib-Jawf oil fields, the southern provinces, and key islands, such as Perim. 

Presently, the UAE and Houthis are engaged in a lengthy and relatively stable stalemate in the Marib area, wherein the Houthis are still present in the surrounding mountains but are unable to leave this area, and the pipelines remain controlled by the UAE and, nominally, the UAE-backed Southern Transition Council (STC). However, it is unclear how long this situation will be tenable, as the Houthis show no signs of abandoning their ambition to control these areas, while the UAE shows no signs of being willing to relinquish them. 

Saudi Arabia

Initially, Mohammed bin Salman saw engaging in the Yemen war as an opportunity to counter the Houthis, whom he saw as challenging Sunni interests in Yemen and as a representative regionally of Shiism. Failure to achieve military objectives and defeat the Houthis means that Saudi Arabia has increasingly viewed Yemen not only as a source of strategic threat and risk to Saudi infrastructure and investor confidence but also a place where that risk could be reduced. 

Since 2021, the Saudis have been pursuing a de-risking strategy toward Iran directly and indirectly through the ongoing political dialogue in Yemen. Within this process, it is unclear whether any of the parties involved believe there is a potential outcome of peace in Yemen through negotiation. Nevertheless, each party is pursuing the process due to individual perception of potential strategic gain for their own position. For example, the Saudis’ participation in this political dialogue since 2021 has made them less of a perceived threat to the Houthis, and in turn, Saudi Arabia has accomplished its objective of reducing the physical and perceived risk to their security. Delivering Vision 2030 requires vast amounts of cash, and de-risking is a key element for securing global investor confidence and buy-in, especially for the “giga-projects” along the Saudis’ own Red Sea coastline, several hundred miles north of the border with Yemen.

The peace process in Yemen has been challenged by the Houthi attacks in the Red Sea. Initially, Saudi Arabia cautioned the U.S. not to pursue any military response in fear that it would precipitate a return to Houthi-Iranian attacks against Saudi territory. No such large-scale attacks have occurred, besides some minor skirmishes along the Saudi-Yemeni border. Overall, the Saudis have succeeded in straddling the fence, accepting the U.S.’ and U.K.’s actions against the Houthis, without endorsing them in a way that would make Saudi Arabia a target or associate it with the coalition itself.

Oman

Oman occupies a key strategic position within these dynamics. In pursuing its role as mediator, Oman has made itself central to Saudi dialogue with the Houthis and indirectly vital to U.S. messaging with Iran. In making itself essential to these processes, Oman is seeking to ensure its own protection. Though Oman and Saudi Arabia have had a strained relationship in the past, bilateral ties have improved since 2019. However, Oman remains wary of Saudi Arabia. In the Omani view, Saudi Arabia is an overweening, powerful state, which may seek to dominate a smaller, poorer power in the near future. Oman views its burgeoning relationship with Iran as a long-term balance to this threat, as assurance that other states, such as Saudi Arabia or the UAE, will not challenge or threaten Oman for fear of reprisal from Iran. Most recently within the context of the maritime attacks, Oman has been used as a channel for diplomatic communications with Iran, though whether a diplomatic resolution is possible without a cease-fire in Gaza is doubtful.

Egypt

On the other side of the Red Sea, the situation in Yemen has been challenging for Egypt. In 2015, as the conflict in Yemen was intensifying and Saudi Arabia and the UAE were preparing to engage, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi was asked to join the campaign. This put him in a difficult position because his government was receiving funding from Abu Dhabi. However, after Egypt’s disastrous experience in the civil war in Yemen in the early 1960s, when they supported the Yemen Arab Republic against the imamate, El-Sisi was unwilling to enter another ground war in Yemen. The Egyptian president’s refusal infuriated the UAE for a period of time, causing a near break between the two sides. Subsequently, Egypt provided a nominal navy presence — but never ground troops — which, in reality, had little to do with the conflict itself. Eventually, the Saudis and the UAE offered Egypt full support because its stability is vital for those states as well as for Europe. 

In the long term, Egypt has paid a price for evading the conflict: It has no role to play in mitigating the situation, even though prolonged conflict is gravely affecting the country. In the first quarter of this year, Egypt’s Suez Canal revenues — the country’s greatest method of earning foreign currency — were down by about 50%. This came at a time when Egypt’s hydrocarbon revenues also plummeted, as domestic consumption and diminishing production have resulted in the inability to export significant quantities of hydrocarbons for profit. Without hydrocarbon revenues, the canal has now become Egypt’s most important revenue source. 

Conclusion

The Houthi anti-shipping campaign has raised the group’s profile as an opponent of Israel that is willing to act in response to the disproportionate Israeli strikes on Gaza, itself a response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks. The Houthi campaign has managed to selectively impose disruptions on ships and cargoes with links to Israel and its supporters, while allowing unaffiliated carriers free passage. As such, it resembles a new and perhaps unique form of targeted economic sanctions. International response to the attacks has been unsuccessful in halting them and may not succeed until a cease-fire is reached in Gaza, or until Iran imposes sufficient pressure on the Houthis to stand down — or both. In the meantime, the Red Sea campaign has allowed the Houthis and Iran to pursue compatible goals that undermine U.S. and Israeli interests in the region, while Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE have distanced themselves from engaging in the conflict.

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