Concerns rise over Middle East war

Escalating attacks on US troops and commercial shipping and incidents often involving Iran and its proxies are causing new concerns that Israel’s war in Gaza could widen into a regional conflagration with grave political and economic consequences, a media report said.

With American service personnel increasingly in a dangerous firing line and with the US and allied naval assets on high alert after multiple drone attacks, the deteriorating situation is leading to a tense holiday period for the White House, CNN reported.

The rising possibility of US combat deaths and the worsening security situation from the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea and stretching through Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Israel represents an unwelcome new foreign crisis as President Joe Biden’s reelection year dawns, CNN reported.

A broadened conflict could have painful economic consequences given the Red Sea’s critical importance to global supply chain routes for energy and goods.

Given the threat to their vessels and crews from drones and missiles from Houthis, several shipping firms have ordered their captains to take the more expensive and time-consuming route around Africa. The potential economic disruption has prompted the US to frame an international coalition to protect merchant ships from Houthi attacks. The US said before Christmas that nations, including the UK, Bahrain, Canada, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, and the Seychelles, had signed up, CNN reported.

Houthis have launched at least 100 attacks against 12 different commercial and merchant vessels in the Red Sea over the last month, in a “very significant breadth of attacks” not seen in at least “two generations”, a senior US military official had said last week.

Yemen’s Houthi leader has warned that his group would attack US ships in the Middle East if Washington waged war against the Iranian-backed militia. “We will not stand idly by if the Americans escalate further and commit foolishness by targeting or waging war against us due to our support for the Hamas movement,” Abdulmalik al-Houthi said in a televised speech aired by Houthi-run al-Masirah TV. “If the US targets us, we will then retaliate by targeting US battleships and interests in the region with our missiles, drones, and military operations,” he warned. Meanwhile, Israel is engaged in a “multi-front war”, its Defence Minister Yoav Galant has said, hinting at military operations across the Middle East as the war in Gaza showed new signs of a dangerous regional escalation, a media report said. Speaking in the Parliament, Gallant said Israel was “coming under attack from seven theatres: Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Judea and Samaria [an Israeli term for the West Bank], Iraq, Yemen and Iran.” “We have already responded and taken action in six of these theatres,” he told the Knesset, without specifying, The Guardian reported.

Iran-allied militias around the Middle East have attacked Israel and US military installations across the region since Hamas launched its devastating attack on southern Israel on October 7, killing 1,140 people and taking up to 250 hostages. Gallant’s comments on Tuesday came as the war in Gaza showed new signs of spreading outside Israel and the Palestinian territories.

Earlier in the day, Egypt said a drone was shot down near the Red Sea resort city of Dahab, the second such occurrence in a month. The drone’s origin was not immediately clear, but Yemen’s Houthi rebels, which are aligned to Iran, have disrupted global trade in the Red Sea with attacks on international vessels and have launched drones and missiles towards Israel, The Guardian reported.

Explosions in the Red Sea off the coast of Yemen were also reported. On Saturday, the US defence department explicitly blamed Iran for the first time for a drone attack targeting a chemical tanker in the Indian Ocean.