Jon Gambrell of The Times of Isreal is reporting that there was an attack on Maersk Gibraltar, a Hong Kong-flagged ship traveling from Oman to Saudi Arabia. It was the latest in a series of seaborne assaults from Yemeni rebels amid the Israel-Hamas war. He writes:
A missile fired from territory controlled by Houthi rebels in Yemen missed a container ship traveling through the crucial Bab el-Mandeb Strait on Thursday, a US defense official said, the latest attack threatening shipping in the crucial maritime chokepoint.
The attack saw the missile splash harmlessly in the water near the Maersk Gibraltar, a Hong Kong-flagged container ship that had been traveling from Salalah, Oman, to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, the official said.
The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters. The official’s comments came after the British military’s United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations, which monitors Mideast shipping lanes, put out an alert warning of an incident in the strait, which separates East Africa from the Arabian Peninsula. […]
In November, Houthis seized a vehicle transport ship linked to Israel in the Red Sea off Yemen. The rebels still hold the vessel near the port city of Hodeida. Separately, a container ship owned by an Israeli billionaire came under attack by a suspected Iranian drone in the Indian Ocean.
A separate, tentative cease-fire between the Houthis and a Saudi-led coalition fighting on behalf of Yemen’s exiled government has held for months despite that country’s long war. That has raised concerns that any wider conflict in the sea — or a potential reprisal strike from Western forces — could reignite those tensions in the Arab world’s poorest nation.
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