Sanaa denies charging ships to cross Bab el Mandeb
The Houthi coordination centre says safe transit is free of charge, two days after Saudi Arabia founded a 14-nation naval coalition in Riyadh with a permanent headquarters.
Brent crude cleared $100 a barrel last week, slid to $72, and has settled back at $88.09. In Serbia that swing is read at the pump rather than on a trading screen, a few weeks after the fact. The cause sits in a channel 29 kilometres across at its narrowest point. Bab el Mandeb, the passage between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, spent the same week being both the subject of a denial from Sanaa and the reason Riyadh pulled some forty governments around one table.
The Houthi-run Humanitarian Operations Coordination Centre (HOCC), which tracks vessel movements through the strait, issued a statement on Saturday rejecting claims that it is preparing to charge for passage. The centre said its safe transit service is voluntary and free of charge, and that anyone demanding payment from shipowners represents neither Yemen nor the HOCC.
The denial landed three days after a Reuters report, published on Wednesday 29 July, saying the Houthis were weighing a levy on shipping. According to that agency’s sources, the idea came out of talks with Iranian officials during a Houthi delegation’s visit to Tehran in early July, and Iranian advisers were said to be helping set up a body that would administer the fee. It is the first time the group has responded to those claims on the record.
What Riyadh set up on 30 July
The founding meeting of the naval coalition was held in Riyadh on 30 July. Saudi Arabia invited 51 countries, 43 of them attended, along with European Union representatives who did not sign. Fourteen founding states put their names to the joint statement:
- Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Pakistan and Egypt
- Qatar, Jordan, Kuwait and Bahrain
- Djibouti, Somalia, Sudan and Comoros
- Bangladesh and Yemen
The United Arab Emirates and Oman stayed out despite comparable interests in the same waters, though the door was left open to them. Saudi Arabia is the founding and lead state, and hosts the permanent headquarters, the joint command and the operations centre.
The Houthi leader’s answer
Houthi leader Abdul Malik al Houthi replied in an address promising a heavier response to the Saudi moves.
We will answer their full escalation with full escalation.
In the same speech he turned to the aircraft Turkey has sold to Saudi Arabia, saying they would “turn into unsold goods once they are shot down over Yemen”. Turkey is one of the 14 signatories to the Riyadh founding statement.
The groundwork for that rhetoric was laid ten days earlier. The Houthis declared a naval blockade of Saudi Arabia on 20 July, and two days later the spokesman for their armed forces, Yahya Saree, announced strikes with ballistic and cruise missiles and drones on the Saudi oil tankers Encelia and Layla: “We targeted two Saudi oil tankers for violating the blockade decision issued by the armed forces.”
What happened at Damietta?
A drone struck a floating storage and regasification unit (FSRU) at the Egyptian port of Damietta on Wednesday 29 July. The vessel sails under the flag of the Marshall Islands, reported to be the Energos Winter, chartered by the US company New Fortress Energy. On 30 July the Egyptian government said preliminary investigations had established that a drone caused the fire aboard two vessels. The Houthis denied involvement the same day and said their operations are confined to Saudi Arabia. No one has claimed the attack.
The numbers behind the nerves
Roughly 30 percent of global shipping moves through the Red Sea, and about 12 percent of world seaborne trade passes through Bab el Mandeb itself. In 2024 the strait carried 4.1 billion barrels of crude and refined products. Before 2023 more than 70 vessels a day went through; over one weekend this July the count fell to 11.
This is the second chokepoint to dominate the headlines this summer. We wrote earlier about the Strait of Hormuz, where Tehran is demanding both shipping lanes, and the logic runs the same way in both cases: control over a few dozen kilometres of water is worth more than any fleet that sails across it.
For now the Riyadh coalition exists as a signature and an address. Its command and operations centre are only starting work, the two states with the longest experience in those waters have stayed outside it, and the HOCC still issues safe transit confirmations on its own, now with an explicit claim that it charges nothing for them.
