Yemen, Between Author and Finisher

The Houthi movement's blockade in the Red Sea was previously thought unstoppable. How easily it ended shows how easily America could put a permanent end to the war on Gaza.

Yemeni soldiers prepare to seize the Galaxy Leader cargo ship in November 2023. Its crew were released in January 2025 after the ceasefire in Gaza was reached. Source: Yemeni Military Media

On January 10, airstrikes rained down on Yemen’s capital, Sana’a. Thousands upon thousands of Yemenis marched through the city’s Saba’een Square, as they had done every Friday since the war against Gaza began. Even as shockwaves shook the street and smoke clouds rose, the demonstrators did not disperse. Instead, they continued, breaking out into chants against Israel and America, filming themselves mocking the bombs, and bellowing that they didn’t care if it became a world war against them.

Yemeni demonstrators had faced military strikes on their marches before: In 2018, when President Saleh Ali as-Sammad was assassinated in a Saudi Arabian drone strike, Saudi planes dropped bombs on the march mourning his death. The response then was the same: to make their chants against America and Israel even louder.

On January 20, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, leader of the Houthi movement that has held Sana’a for the past 10 years, made an address to the nation. The ceasefire in Gaza had successfully reached the first phase of implementation, and therefore the “15-month round of confrontation” with Israel was over. Yemeni forces under the organization’s command would now return to a state of readiness and preparation, its front only to be reawakened should the “Israeli enemy return to escalation, genocidal crimes, and siege” upon the Gaza Strip.

Over the course of the past year, the Houthi movement’s blockade of the Red Sea in support of Gaza had rapidly become a maelstrom, sucking in the world’s military powers, led by the United States and the United Kingdom, and embroiling states both near and far into open war with the Middle East’s poorest nation. Conversely, just as these nations have been sucked in, outside this arena, the cost of the war, human, political, and otherwise, has begun to press deeply on Yemen’s allies.