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Houthi forces fired three ballistic missiles at the cargo ship Tihamah in the Bab al-Mandeb Strait on August 11, killing four crew members, then struck the rescue operation that followed, killing two responders, Yemen's internationally recognized government said. Ten people were wounded, including seven crew.
The Tihamah is an Egyptian-owned, Tanzania-flagged vessel that was carrying food. Yemen's Transport Ministry said the dead crew members were three Pakistani nationals and one Indonesian. The Times of Israel reported the ship had sailed from Salalah in Oman via Djibouti. The follow-up missile hit as rescue personnel were evacuating the dead and wounded, killing two members of the government-allied National Resistance Forces, according to Yemen's coastguard.
The Houthis made no official statement on the Tihamah. The group's Saba news agency reported an attack on a Saudi ship carrying military equipment in Bab al-Mandeb, without naming the vessel. Saudi Arabia did not immediately respond to that claim.
These are the first shipping deaths linked to the Houthis since the US and Israel launched the war on Iran on February 28. The group's previous Red Sea campaign, between November 2023 and January 2025, targeted more than 100 merchant vessels, sank two, and pushed much of the world's container traffic onto the longer route around southern Africa.
The attack extends an escalation we covered last week, when Houthi missiles killed more than 30 Yemeni government soldiers and Riyadh braced for strikes on its energy sites and airports. The wider trigger was the collapse of the UN-backed 2022 truce in Yemen's civil war, which broke down after a Saudi air strike on the Sanaa airport runway on July 13. The Houthis have since declared a blockade of Saudi shipping in the Red Sea, struck the Abha airport and a Saudi Aramco refinery at Jizan, and launched missile and drone attacks on the Yemeni port city of al-Makha and the central province of Marib. The Saudi-led coalition has answered with strikes on Hodeidah and Kamaran island.
Yemen's Foreign Ministry called on the international community to move from condemnation to action against the group. The UN warned the renewed hostilities risk drawing Yemen into a broader regional confrontation. Bab al-Mandeb remains an active missile environment for commercial shipping, with rescue crews now among the casualties.
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