US and UK ‘shoot down’ barrage of Houthi airstrikes in Red Sea
Yemen’s Houthi rebels fired one of their largest barrage of drones and missiles targeting shipping in the Red Sea, forcing the American and British navies to shoot down the projectiles in a major engagement, authorities said on Wednesday.
No damage or injuries were immediately apparent.
The Associated Press reports that the attack by the Iran-backed Houthis came despite a planned UN security council vote later on Wednesday to potentially condemn and demand an immediate halt to the attacks by the rebels, who say their assaults are aimed at stopping Israel’s war on Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
However, their targets have increasingly tenuous or no relationship with Israel and imperil one of the world’s crucial trade routes linking Asia and the Middle East to Europe. That raises the risk of a US retaliatory strike on Yemen that could upend an uneasy ceasefire that has held in the Arab world’s poorest country.
The assault happened off the Yemeni port cities of Hodeida and Mokha, according to the private intelligence firm Ambrey. In the Hodeida incident, Ambrey said ships described over radio seeing missiles and drones, with US-allied warships in the area urging “vessels to proceed at maximum speed”.
Off Mokha, ships saw missiles fired, a drone in the air and small vessels trailing them, Ambrey said early on Wednesday. The British military’s United Kingdom Marine Trade Operations also acknowledged the incident off Hodeida.
The US military’s Central Command (Centcom) said the “complex attack” launched by the Houthis included bomb-carrying drones, anti-ship cruise missiles and one anti-ship ballistic missile.
It said 18 drones, two cruise missiles and the anti-ship missile were downed by F-18s from the USS Eisenhower, as well as by American Arleigh Burke-class destroyers the USS Gravely, the USS Laboon and the USS Mason, as well as the UK’s HMS Diamond.
Centcom said:
This is the 26th Houthi attack on commercial shipping lanes in the Red Sea since Nov 19 … Vessels are advised to transit with caution and report any suspicious activity.
The Houthis, a Shia group that has held Yemen’s capital since 2014, did not formally acknowledge launching the attacks. However, Al Jazeera quoted an anonymous Houthi military official saying their forces “targeted a ship linked to Israel in the Red Sea”, without elaborating.
Iran has rejected US and British calls to end its support for Houthi attacks on Israeli-linked vessels. A US-led coalition of nations has been patrolling the Red Sea to try to prevent the strikes.
Key events
Opening summary
Hello and welcome to our live reporting of the Israel-Gaza war and the wider Middle East crisis. I’m Adam Fulton and here’s a rundown on the latest news.
Yemen’s Houthi rebels have fired one of their largest barrages of drones and missiles targeting shipping in the Red Sea, forcing the US and British navies to shoot down the projectiles in a major engagement, the US military says.
No damage or injuries were immediately reported in the attack with 18 drones and three missiles, which came despite a planned UN security council vote later on Wednesday to potentially demand a halt to the strikes by the rebels, who say the assaults are aimed at stopping Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza.
More on that story soon. In other key developments as it turns 7.30am in Gaza City, Tel Aviv and Beirut:
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Israel and Hezbollah edged closer towards full scale war on Tuesday, as the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group launched explosive drones at a key Israeli command base, declaring the attack part of its response to recent high-level Israeli assassinations in Lebanon. Hezbollah said it launched “a number of explosive attack drones” at the Israeli northern military command base in Safed, the first time it has targeted the site. An Israeli army spokesperson said there were no casualties or damage.
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Israeli aircraft, drones and artillery struck multiple targets inside southern Lebanon, including a strike on a car during the funeral of a senior commander in Hezbollah’s elite Radwan force, Wissam Hassan al Tawil, who had been killed the day before. Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister, Najib Mikati, said his country was open to negotiations but was being threatened with war.
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Hezbollah denied a claim by the Israeli military that it killed the southern Lebanon commander of Hezbollah’s aerial unit in an airstrike on Tuesday. The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) said Ali Hussein Barji had led dozens of drone attacks on Israel. But Hezbollah said that “the commander was never subjected to any assassination attempt as the enemy claimed”.
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The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, has dismissed South Africa’s genocide charge against Israel as “meritless”, but said the daily toll of war on civilians in Gaza was “far too high”. At a press conference in Tel Aviv, Blinken urged Israeli leaders to work with moderate Palestinian leaders, saying regional countries would only invest in the reconstruction of Gaza if there is a “pathway to a Palestinian state”. He was “crystal clear” that Palestinians must be able to return to their homes “as soon as conditions allow”, he said.
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Intense fighting, shelling and aerial bombardment continued across the south and centre of Gaza as Blinken met top officials in Israel on a regional tour aimed at reaching a consensus on the Palestinian territory’s future and stopping an escalation of the war across the Middle East. US officials said Blinken told the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, that his forces must avoid inflicting further harm on civilians in Gaza. But there was no sign of any letup in the violence in Gaza as the two men met.
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A total of 23,210 Palestinians have been killed and 59,167 have been wounded in Israeli strikes on Gaza since 7 October, according to the latest figures by the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry on Tuesday. About 126 Palestinians were killed and 241 were wounded over the previous 24 hours, it said.
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The leaders of Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority, which administers parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, will meet on Wednesday to discuss the war in Gaza and surging violence in the West Bank. Jordan’s King Abdullah II will host a summit with the Egyptian president, Abdel Fattah el-Sissi, and the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, in the southern Red Sea city of Aqaba, Jordan’s royal court said.
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Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has condemned “in the strongest possible terms” a strike on an MSF shelter in Khan Younis in southern Gaza on Monday. A five-year-old daughter of an MSF staff worker was critically injured by the strike and died of her injuries on Tuesday, the charity said. It had notified Israeli forces that the shelter was housing MSF staff and their families, it said.
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Hamas’s most senior political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, has called on Muslim states to provide Palestinian militants with weapons, saying the group’s war with Israel is “not the battle of the Palestinian people alone”. At a conference in Doha, Haniyeh said Israel had “failed to achieve any of its goals” after nearly 100 days of its war in Gaza, and argued that the Hamas attacks on Israel on 7 October “came after an attempt to marginalise the Palestinian cause”.
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The UK maritime trade operations said it received a report of an incident in the Red Sea near Yemen. The reported incident was about 50 nautical miles (93 km) west of Yemen’s Hodeidah and authorities were investigating, it said on Tuesday. A Yemeni military source told Al Jazeera that Houthis had targeted a ship linked to Israel. in the Red Sea.
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The previous UK Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, will join a South African delegation for this week’s hearings at the international court of justice, where the country has accused Israel of genocide in Gaza. Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, said “there is nothing more atrocious and preposterous” than the lawsuit as he censured South Africa for bringing the case, which is due to begin hearings on Thursday. Belgium’s deputy prime minister, Petra De Sutter, also expressed support for South Africa’s case.
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The British foreign secretary, David Cameron, admitted he was “worried” that Israel might have taken action in Gaza that could breach international law. Cameron also confirmed to parliament’s foreign affairs committee that two British nationals are still being held hostage in Gaza. The UK government accepted that Israel as an occupying power had a duty under international humanitarian law to provide basic supplies to the people of Gaza.
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The international criminal court confirmed it was investigating potential crimes against journalists since the war broke out. At least 79 journalists and media workers – the vast majority of them Palestinian – have been killed in the past three months, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
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UN international law experts have criticised the killing of Hamas’s deputy leader, Saleh al-Arouri, and other fighters in drone strikes in Lebanon. UN special rapporteurs Ben Saul and Morris Tidball-Binz said killings in foreign territory were arbitrary when they were not authorised under international law.
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The planet-warming emissions generated during the first two months of the war in Gaza were greater than the annual carbon footprint of more than 20 of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations, new research reveals.
