Скачать или смотреть Middle East Crisis: U.S. Says It Hit a Houthi Cruise Missile That Threatened Red Sea Ships

Houthi tribesmen gathering near Sana, Yemen, on Sunday to show defiance after the U.S. and Britain struck Houthi positions.


The U.S. announced a new strike on Houthi militants in Yemen, the third straight day that Western allies targeted Iranian-backed armed groups in the region.


The Houthis vow to respond to an earlier wave of American and British airstrikes in northern Yemen.

The United States said on Sunday that it had targeted Iranian-backed armed groups in the Middle East for a third straight day, destroying an anti-ship cruise missile belonging to the Houthi militia in Yemen, which had vowed to respond to earlier strikes by the U.S. and its allies.

The strike came a day after the United States, Britain and a handful of allies said they had hit 36 Houthi targets in 13 locations in northern Yemen in the latest salvo aimed at deterring the group from attacking ships in the Red Sea. A Houthi military spokesman, Yahya Sarea, said on Sunday that targets in at least six regions of Yemen were hit, though his statement did not say how much damage the strikes had caused.

Soon after the statement was posted, the U.S. military announced its latest strike, saying it had destroyed a Houthi anti-ship cruise missile that had posed “an imminent threat to U.S. Navy ships and merchant vessels in the region.”

Blinken is heading back to the Middle East to continue negotiations on hostages and Gaza aid.


Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken was expected to depart on Sunday for a four-nation trip to the Middle East as part of continuing diplomatic negotiations related to the Israel-Hamas war.

The trip comes after two days in which the United States helped carry out a new round of strikes against Houthi targets in Yemen and also bombed seven sites in Syria and Iraq that are linked to militias with close ties to Iran, a significant escalation in the use of American force that runs the risk of widening the conflict rippling out from Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza.

The U.S. strikes in Iraq and Syria on Friday were in retaliation for a drone attack on a military base in Jordan that killed three American soldiers, an assault Washington has blamed on an Iran-backed militia in Iraq. In what appeared to be an effort to avoid sparking a war involving Iran, the United States refrained from hitting Iranian territory and let it be known the attack was coming days in advance, giving the militias being targeted and their Iranian military advisers time to move.



House G.O.P. plans a vote on aid for Israel as the Senate tries to close a broader deal.

Speaker Mike Johnson pledged Saturday that the House would hold a vote next week on legislation to speed $17.6 billion in security assistance to Israel with no strings attached, a move likely to complicate Senate leaders’ efforts to rally support for a broader package with border security measures and aid to Ukraine.

Mr. Johnson’s announcement to members of his conference came as senators were scrambling to finalize and vote on a bipartisan national security bill that has taken months to negotiate. The move could further erode G.O.P. support for the emerging compromise, which was already flagging under criticism from party leaders like Mr. Johnson and former President Donald J. Trump.

Mr. Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, has said that the Senate package would be dead on arrival in the House, arguing that its border security measures are not stringent enough to clamp down on a recent surge of immigration. He said the House would instead focus its efforts on the impeachment of Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary — a vote on which is now expected to take place next week.


Hamas signals that wide gaps remain on reaching a cease-fire agreement.


Even as hopes have risen about the possibility of reaching a hostage release deal and cease-fire in the nearly four-month war between Israel and Hamas, substantial gaps between the two sides remain, a Hamas official has said.

A proposal hammered out in Paris last week “is being studied by the movement’s leadership and other resistance factions,” Osama Hamdan, a leader in Hamas’s political wing in Lebanon, told the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation International on Friday. “But we cannot say that we have reached a conclusion.”

In the negotiating room, Israel was still insisting that “the military operation in Gaza would continue” after the cease-fire, Mr. Hamdan said, which contradicted Hamas’s condition for a permanent truce. Another key sticking point was an Israeli demand for a buffer zone inside Gaza, he added.



How closely does Iran control the militias it backs? It depends.
Iran projects its military power through dozens of armed groups across the Middle East, but how much does it control their actions?