President Trump on Tuesday suggested he could restart a bombing campaign in Yemen in response to the Houthis, officially known as Ansar Allah, enforcing a blockade on the Red Sea.
Trump’s comments came after Ansar Allah announced a maritime blockade on Saudi Arabia, which came a week after the Saudis bombed Yemen’s Sanaa airport to prevent the landing of a plane carrying a Yemeni delegation from Iran to enforce its long-standing blockade on the country that was eased under a 2022 ceasefire deal but never fully lifted.
Ansar Allah has already warned shipping companies against using Saudi ports, and Reuters reported that two oil tankers loaded with Saudi crude bound for China and India made U-turns in the Red Sea, heading for the Suez Canal instead of attempting to cross the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. Yemeni media reported that a total of six ships turned around following the warning.
For his part, Trump downplayed the blockade, claiming it hasn’t started yet. “So far, it hasn’t happened, might happen, but we take care of things,” Trump told reporters while meeting with Lebanese President Joseph Aoun in the Oval Office.
“If something like that happens, we take care of it. You know, we’ve done that with the Houthis before, and we haven’t heard from them in a while since we did what we did originally,” he added.
Trump launched a bombing campaign in Yemen on March 15, 2025, a few days after Ansar Allah announced it was renewing its blockade of Israeli-linked shipping in the Red Sea in response to Israel violating the January 2025 Gaza ceasefire deal by imposing a full blockade on the Palestinian territory.
The US bombing campaign lasted about a month and a half and involved major civilian casualties, including the bombing of the Ras Issa Fuel Port in Hodeidah, which killed 84 people, all civilians, according to the monitoring group Airwars. A few days after the strike, the US bombed a migrant detention facility in Saada, killing 68 African migrants.
Airwars recorded more than 250 civilian deaths in Yemen as a result of the bombing campaign, which ended on May 6 with a ceasefire between the US and Ansar Allah as the US failed to end the blockade on Israeli-linked shipping and the Yemeni missile and drone attacks on Israel that began after Israel restarted its full-scale bombing campaign in Gaza.
President Biden also conducted a bombing campaign against Ansar Allah that failed to stop the blockade on Israeli shipping that lasted from January 2024 to January 2025, until the Gaza ceasefire deal halted the Yemeni attacks.
The US also backed a brutal Saudi/UAE war against Ansar Allah from 2015 until the ceasefire in 2022, which killed hundreds of thousands of Yemenis, including many children who starved to death under a blockade, but failed at reinstalling the government of former Yemeni President Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi, who died in Riyadh earlier this year.
