Category World News

Yemen’s Houthi rebels claim to be working with Tehran as the Israeli-Iran conflict escalates.

Since 2023, the Houthis, also known as Ansar Allah, have launched attacks against Israel and shipping in the Red Sea in a bid to support Palestinians in Gaza.

According to Houthi spokesperson Yahya Saree, who added that the Yemeni group was coordinating with the Israeli army’s operations against the “criminal Israeli enemy,” the Houthis claim that their most recent attacks are being carried out for the “Palestinian and Iranian peoples.”

The Houthis announced that they had targeted Israel on Sunday, two days after Israel launched an initial assault on Iran on June 13.

Saree claimed that the group had fired several ballistic missiles at Jaffa during a televised address.

According to Hussain Albukhaiti, a pro-Houthi political commentator, the Houthis are planning their attacks against Iranians.

According to Albukhaiti, the Houthis are “launching missiles” “after Iran has launched its missiles.” In order to reduce the Palestinian people’s fear of the Zionist settlers in Gaza, Israelis keep moving between their homes.

The Houthi attacks are essentially continuations of Israel’s previous frequent missile and drone attacks. Most of the attacks have been intercepted by Israelis, but some have even managed to pass, most notably an early May attack at Ben Gurion that left six people injured and forced flights to be halted.

According to Yemen expert Nicholas Brumfield, the Houthi attacks have also had a negative impact on Israeli defenses.

Israel must spread out its air defenses in order to more effectively repel counterattacks coming from Iran, he told Al Jazeera.

routes for shipping

The Houthis began attacking ships in the Red Sea in November 2023, according to reports that they were connected to Israel. Yemen’s Houthi-controlled regions are forced to pass by international ships entering the Red Sea.

Following a US bombing campaign reportedly resulting in the deaths of more than 200 people in Yemen, the attacks have stopped in recent months, particularly after the Houthis and the United States reached an agreement to stop attacking one another in early May.

The Houthis never agreed to stop attacking Israel, which has also continued to bomb Yemen, and the attacks may still be coming back.

According to Albukhaiti, “We had an agreement with the US to stop attacking each other, but Yemen will not adhere to that agreement if the US joins the Zionists in attacking Iran.”

Trump’s unilateral withdrawal from the nuclear agreement between Iran and several Western nations in 2018 was mentioned by the US president, “We recall that Trump cancelled the nuclear deal between Iran and the US,” he said. Trump allegedly canceled the deal because it was against Israel’s wishes.

He said, “Yemen will do the same, and we will cancel the agreement with the US because it is not in the interests of Iran, which is a significant ally of Yemen,” referring to the Houthi rebel group as “Yemen,” despite the country’s opposition to its government’s legitimacy.

Iran has also threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz, which separates Oman from Iran. The Strait of Hormuz passes through roughly 20 million barrels per day (BPD), or roughly 20% of the global petroleum liquids consumed, according to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA).

According to experts, the Houthis may do the same in the Red Sea.

According to Brumfield, sea mines are “very low-tech, easy-to-make mines that would still cause significant uncertainty for global shippers.”

“I don’t believe Iran or Yemen will be reluctant to obstruct, if necessary, all of our region’s shipping routes,” Albukhaiti continued.

Gulf states’ risks

Additionally, there are concerns that the conflict might drag on in other region nations. The Houthis have previously engaged in combat in many Middle Eastern nations, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and the US has bases there.

Gulf nations could become threatened by Houthi attacks if the conflict escalates.

The Houthis are attempting to recover from the US strikes that occurred between mid-March and mid-May, according to Brumfield, who suggests that they aren’t begging to rekindle those more intense strikes. If they saw themselves as a major regional conflict between the US and Israel and the Axis of Resistance, especially if US military resources were being diverted to Iran, I believe they would be amenable to restart them.

Because “we are still at war with these countries,” Albukhaiti claimed Houthi forces “could also target US bases in the region,” particularly those associated with the coalition against Yemen, such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

In 2015, the Saudi-led coalition launched a year-long airstrikes campaign against the Houthis and Yemen’s internationally renowned government, militarily participating in the conflict. Saudi Arabia and the Houthis have not officially reached a resolution in Yemen, despite the fact that they have already ceased fighting there in 2022.

It had previously been attacked by Houthi. Houthi drone strikes on oil plants in Saudi Arabia resulted in a reduction of about 50% in Saudi oil production in 2019. According to analysts, the Saudis have worked hard ever since to prevent further attacks by maintaining more stable relations with the Houthis.

The detente may still be present if the Houthis decide to re-hit their northern neighbor in spite of these efforts.

Brumfield said, “I don’t believe that attacks on Saudi Arabia are off the table.” It’s possible that Houthi leaders would attack the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as part of a general escalation in both the regional and Yemeni conflict if they prevail in favor of a military-first strategy.

Brumfield added that as the Houthis attempt to reach a resolution for the conflict in Yemen, they will also need to remember that Saudi Arabia has provided “diplomatic cover” for the Houthis in recent years. Saudi Arabia would likely abandon that strategy in the event of Houthi attacks.

Internal conflict

Anti-Houthi organizations in Yemen have been paying close attention to events over the past few months as a result of the Houthis’ initial US offensive and Iran’s weakening.

According to independent Yemen analyst Raiman Al-Hamdani, “the most the Houthis are] capable of doing is continuing their symbolic attacks on Israel or possibly restarting activity in the Red Sea,” However, doing so could lead to a new military stance from the US, Israel, and the UK, which might lessen their standing domestically and make room for anti-Houthi organizations to exploit any resulting instability.

However, according to analysts, the Yemeni government and other groups that are opposed to the Houthis are unable to effectively seize control of the Houthis.

The Houthis would likely respond if those groups mobilized, Albukhaiti said.

A number of people were seriously injured when an Iranian missile struck a building in Israel’s Haifa at this point. On Friday, Israel’s government reportedly fired about 20 missiles at Israel; explosions were audible over Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

United States President Donald Trump will decide Washington’s course of action in relation to the Israel-Iran conflict in two weeks’ time, the White House said on Thursday.

Speculation has been rising this week that the US could decide to assist its longstanding ally, Israel, in strikes against Iran, which it claims are designed to neutralise Iran’s nuclear programme. In particular, Israel wants the US to provide “bunker buster” bombs, which may be able to penetrate deep within the mountain in northwest Iran, where the Fordow nuclear facility is located.

This comes after a week of Trump shifting his position on the conflict.

Here is what we know:

What has Trump said about potential US action in Iran?

On Thursday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt shared what she described as a direct quote from the US president with reporters: “Based on the fact that there’s a substantial chance of negotiations that may or may not take place with Iran in the near future, I will make my decision whether or not to go within the next two weeks.”

How has Trump changed his position on the Iran-Israel conflict?

When Israel first attacked Iran late on June 13, the Trump administration clearly stated that it had not been involved, calling Israel’s attack “unilateral action”. It has become clear since then, however, that the US did have knowledge of the attacks in advance.

Trump also said he believed Iran was “very close” to having a nuclear weapon during the Group of Seven (G7) summit in Canada this week, contradicting his own US intelligence reports. This marked a shift from his position in May, when he made public statements that Tehran and Washington were close to a nuclear deal.

On Wednesday, Trump refused to say whether the US would join the conflict.

“I may do it. I may not do it. I mean, nobody knows what I’m going to do,” he told reporters outside the White House.

Finally, on Thursday, Trump appeared to give a two-week deadline for talks with Iran to succeed before the US would take action.

Does this mean Trump has delayed a US attack on Iran for two weeks?

No. It also does not necessarily mean the US will attack Iran at all. Leavitt remained ambiguous on what could happen after two weeks.

The press secretary said: “The president is always interested in a diplomatic solution … he is a peacemaker-in-chief. He is the peace-through-strength president. And so, if there’s a chance for diplomacy, the president’s always going to grab it. But he’s not afraid to use strength as well.”

But Mona Yacoubian, senior adviser and director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), said that while two weeks would give time for more negotiations with Iran, it would also provide the US with time to “flow in additional forces should it decide to join Israel in the conflict”.

For now, it is impossible to say which of these two possibilities is more likely – or if the “two weeks” mentioned by Trump is even a deadline at all.

“I don’t even know if President Trump knows what he wants,” Iranian American analyst Negar Mortazavi told Al Jazeera.

“He campaigned as the president of peace … he promised he’s going to end conflicts. Russia-Ukraine hasn’t ended. Gaza has escalated, and he just let the third big Middle East war, which looks like a regime-change war, start under his watch. So, he says one thing. He does another.”

Others believe Trump’s “two weeks” comment is a negotiation tactic to apply pressure on Iran during talks.

Jamal Abdi, president of the National Iranian American Council, told Al Jazeera that Trump could be attempting to build leverage with threats to strong-arm Iran into accepting his demands of “total surrender”.

“I think he’s trying to present himself as this madman who is unpredictable, and in so doing, he can then insist on this very hard line that Iran has refused to accept for decades of full dismantlement of its [nuclear] enrichment programme,” Abdi told Al Jazeera.

“The delay certainly could be part of a broader negotiating strategy which exploits Iran’s weakened position as a result of wide-ranging military strikes to extract more substantial concessions from Iran on the nuclear issue and potentially on other points of contention as well, for example its ballistic missiles programme,” Yacoubian said.

⁠”It’s extremely difficult to predict what will happen next,” she added. “President Trump’s idiosyncratic negotiating strategy alongside his instinctual, ‘from-the-gut’ decision-making approach underscores the unpredictability of the coming days – which may well be the point!”

Has Trump declared deadlines before, and has he stuck to them?

In the past, Trump has assigned similar timelines relating to Iran’s nuclear programme, the Russia-Ukraine war and global trade tariffs. But he does not always stick to them.

“Imposing deadlines stands as perhaps the one predictable element of Trump’s approach to finding solutions to complex problems,” said Yacoubian. “Setting explicit deadlines has characterised Trump’s negotiating style in several realms, from Ukraine to politically sensitive domestic challenges.”

Iran-Israel conflict

In the lead-up to the current conflict, Trump says he gave Iran a 60-day deadline to negotiate an agreement over its nuclear programme, but talks continued beyond its expiry, Yacoubian noted. In the end, it was Israel which took action, launching a series of strikes on Iranian military and nuclear sites on June 13.

Russia-Ukraine war

Since the beginning of his presidency in January this year, Trump has been attempting to lead peace negotiations to bring an end to the war in Ukraine.

On May 28, Trump set a two-week deadline to determine whether his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, was willing to end the conflict.

Trump told reporters then: “Within two weeks. We’re gonna find out whether or not [Putin is] tapping us along or not. And if he is, we’ll respond a little bit differently.”

As the two-week window approached an end, the New York Post asked Trump in a podcast whether Putin cared about Russia losing thousands of soldiers in Ukraine. He said, “I’m starting to think maybe he doesn’t.”

Since the two-week window ended, Russia and Ukraine do not appear to be any closer to a peace agreement. But Trump has not signalled a shift in US policy towards Russia despite his previous threat.

A report by the Reuters news agency, published on Tuesday, further claimed that the Trump administration had disbanded an interagency working group aimed at placing pressure on Russia to speed up talks with Ukraine. Reuters cited three unnamed US officials in its report. The existence of this working group had not been made public.

Trade tariffs

Trump has also announced pauses and delays to his on-again-off-again trade tariffs first imposed on trading partners of the US in April.

In April, he announced a 90-day pause for all its tariff targets except China, with which the US reached a trade deal earlier this month. The tariff pause is set to expire on July 8.

Olorato Mongale, a 30-year-old South African woman, went out with a man she had just met on May 25.

She passed away less than two hours later.

In Lombardy West, a suburb north of Johannesburg, her half-naked body was discovered by the side of the road. It exhibited signs of extensive bruising and trauma. Investigators determined that she had been murdered elsewhere and dumped at the scene.

Her assassination, which was brutal and senseless, caused a wave of outcry on social media. A family representative discovered that Mongale, a master’s student at the University of the Witwatersrand, had previously worked as a journalist after it was revealed by a family representative days later. She left the field seven years ago because of the emotional impact of reporting on femicide and gender-based violence (GBVF).

According to her family, Mongale’s anxiety was escalating as she became more receptive to male violence. She was particularly perplexed by Karabo Mokoena’s murder in 2017 and particularly. Ex-boyfriend Sandile Mantsoe, who killed Moena, burned her body beyond recognition and buried the remains in Lyndhurst, a suburb just a few kilometers away from where Mongale’s body was discovered, before burying the body in open grassland.

Mongale eventually came to be what she had feared most: another name added to the growing list of South African women who have been murdered by men despite her conscious attempts to avoid Mokoena’s fate.

Her daughter tried frantically to stop her attacker, according to her mother, Keabetswe Mongale, at her funeral on June 1.

“I could see that my daughter was fighting when I saw her at the government mortuary.” She fought until her nails broke, she claimed.

Despite years of government promises and improvements, her tragic death serves as a powerful reminder that women and girls in South Africa are still facing an existential threat from gender-based violence.

A bill establishing the National Council on Gender-Based Violence and Femicide was signed into law on May 24, 2024, by President Cyril Ramaphosa. The organization is tasked with coordinating and leading the fight against GBVF. Although it appeared to be moving forward, it wasn’t a radical change.

Not the first initiative of this nature. The National Council Against Gender-Based Violence was established in 2012 by then-Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe, who had a similar role in coordinating national anti-GBV initiatives.

With yet another council in place, GBVF crimes continue more than ten years later.

South Africa’s first national study on GBVF was released by the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) in November 2023. According to the study, “deeply ingrained societal norms and structures that perpetuate male dominance and reinforce gender hierarchies… leading to female subordination, systemic inequalities, and violence against women” are the causes of gender-based violence.

It is undisputed that enshrined patriarchy has a destructive effect. Every three hours, a woman is murdered in South Africa. That’s equivalent to 8 women per day. According to one study, there are approximately 7.8 million women in the nation who have experienced physical or sexual abuse.

Black women are more susceptible to GBVF, an ongoing symptom of apartheid and its structural inequalities, despite the fact that women of all races and backgrounds are affected.

South Africa is not the only country experiencing this crisis. Girls and women are a continent-wide phenomenon for their terror.

The United Nations released its report Femicides in 2023: Global Estimates of Intimate Partner/Family Member Femicides in November 2024, which revealed that Africa had the highest rate of partner-related femicide in the world that year.

For its astounding stats, Kenya stands out.

More than 7, 100 cases of sexual and gender-based violence were recorded in the nation between September 2023 and December 2024. In just four months, at least 100 women were murdered by male acquaintances, relatives, or intimate partners.

Rebecca Cheptegei, a mother of two and Olympian from Uganda, was one of the victims of the 2024 Paris Games marathon. She was doused in gasoline and set her ablaze in Eldoret, Kenya, on September 5, 2024, after her ex-boyfriend had allegedly abused her and set her alight during a domestic dispute. She later passed away in Eldoret, Kenya, from severe burns. He later succumbed to his injuries in a hospital.

The Kenyan government later acknowledged GBVF as the nation’s most pressing security issue, in a belated but crucial step.

The National Gender and Equality Commission of Kenya noted on May 26 that there is “a complex interplay of cultural, social, economic, and legal factors” contributing to the rise in GBVF crimes. While harmful practices like forced marriage, female genital mutilation (FGM), and dowry-related violence continue to perpetuate inequality and legitimize violence, patriarchal traditions add to the dangers of women’s lives. Their vulnerability only grows worse as a result of economic hardship and financial dependence.

We are witnessing a perilous resurgence of patriarchal norms across the continent.

The COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020 added to the crisis’s scope. Numerous behavioural change campaigns have been launched since then, but they have largely failed.

This is not surprising.

Nearly 48 percent of Africans believe domestic violence is a private matter, not a criminal offence, according to Afrobarometer data from November 2023.

Despite their education or economic status, many African men do not prioritize the safety or rights of women and girls.

South African rugby captain Siya Kolisi made the clear statement on International Women’s Day last year: “Men are not doing enough.”

In fact, many people continue to support harmful customs like child marriage and are uninterested in efforts to protect women. A growing body count has resulted from years of meaningless rhetoric.

African men must now accept this crisis as their own and commit to radical change.

They must reject dehumanizing cultural ideals and ideals of manhood. The cultural makeup of African societies is not unchanging, and patriarchy is not a destiny. A new, egalitarian conception of African masculinity needs to be developed, one that emphasizes equality, dignity, and nonviolence.

This cultural shift must begin in families, be sustained through traditional religious gatherings, schools, and community life.

Olarato Mongale must take advantage of it. For Rebecca Cheptegei. for the countless others who lost their lives.

And most importantly, it must happen for the women and girls who know that the men who live close to them may pose the greatest threat to them every day.

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