For years, global navies treated the Red Sea as a managed corridor, strategic, certainly, but ultimately predictable. From 2023 through 2025, that assumption collapsed. From Yemen’s western coastline, long framed exclusively through humanitarian catastrophe and geopolitical marginality, a new reality asserted itself: Yemen emerged as one of the most consequential maritime actors of the decade.
What unfolded exposed the fragility of global trade when geography, asymmetric force, and political resolve intersect. Yemen’s naval campaign pursued two clearly stated objectives: pressuring “Israel” toward an unconditional ceasefire in Gaza and forcing an end to the blockade on the Strip. Nevertheless, its effects rippled far beyond, unsettling long-standing assumptions about maritime dominance itself.
As US-Yemeni activist Ahmad Alyabri observed, Yemen “transformed from a weak, besieged state into a decisive actor capable of reshaping maritime rules in the Red Sea and beyond.”
At the heart of this recalibration lies the Bab al-Mandab Strait, a narrow artery through which roughly 12 percent of global seaborne oil and nearly a third of containerized trade typically pass. Yemen’s intervention demonstrated a blunt truth maritime planners had long resisted: control over chokepoints no longer requires aircraft carriers or blue-water fleets. Precision, persistence, and strategic ambiguity can suffice.
Operating through the Yemeni Navy and Coastal Defense Forces, the maritime arm of the Yemeni Armed Forces, Sanaa showed how relatively modest means could impose disproportionate costs on a system built for uninterrupted flow. As one Yemeni fighter put it, “Bab al-Mandab is one of the most critical maritime straits in the world. Any attempt to close it would choke global trade. That is why the maritime ban option was activated.”
Yemeni maritime operations in the Red Sea — involving attacks on commercial and military vessels — began in late 2023, shortly after the outbreak of the Israeli war on Gaza in October 2023. They started targeting ships in November 2023, initially focusing on vessels linked to "Israel" and later expanded the campaign to include other ships transiting the Red Sea and nearby waters.
Independent monitors quickly registered the scale of disruption. The UK Maritime Trade Operations office logged 69 security incidents in November–December 2023 alone, followed by another 55 between January and March 2024, nearly five times historical norms. ACLED documented 164 missile launches and 265 armed drones targeting commercial shipping between October 2023 and April 2024, striking at least 79 vessels and directly hitting 29.
From late 2024 through 2025, more than 130 additional incidents or attempted interceptions were recorded against Israeli-linked shipping and US naval assets transiting the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, according to sources like ACLED, The Washington Institute, and UK Parliament.
These operations, combining missiles, long-range drones, fast attack boats, and real-time surveillance, forced shipping conglomerates to redraw the map of global trade.
By mid-2025, over half of Asia-Europe container traffic was rerouted around the Cape of Good Hope, adding weeks to delivery times and thousands of nautical miles per voyage. The economic logic was unavoidable.
A Yemeni Resistance fighter, speaking to Al Mayadeen English, described an expanding arsenal: anti-ship and land-attack missiles, explosive-laden surface vessels, and unmanned underwater platforms, many domestically produced.
These capabilities, publicly showcased in Sana’a and tested in military drills, were operationally deployed, including the July 2025 sinking of the Greek-operated Magic Seas and Eternity C during operations carried out in solidarity with Gaza
He also pointed to hints by Ansar Allah leader Sayyed Abdul-Malik al-Houthi of additional, undisclosed weapons yet to be revealed, an ambiguity that itself became part of Yemen’s deterrent posture.
Dr. Abdulmalik M. Eissa, Professor of Political Sociology at Sanaa University, highlights a fundamental shift in maritime power: authority at sea is no longer determined solely by conventional military strength. Instead, smaller actors can exert influence by disrupting freedom of navigation and imposing political conditions, forcing the international system to recognize them as significant players in maritime security.
According to Dr. Eissa, this evolution reflects a broader structural change in regional naval dynamics. Non-state and asymmetric actors are increasingly leveraging political, economic, and technological tools to challenge established norms of maritime sovereignty. The strategic focus, he notes, has shifted from whether conventional powers can control the sea to whether the international system can adapt its rules to confront these hybrid threats.
Dr. Eissa emphasizes that modern maritime war now integrates conventional combat assets, such as missiles and drones, with information-based tactics, including cyber interference, open-source intelligence, and vessel tracking. By exploiting GPS and AIS vulnerabilities, actors like Sanaa can disrupt navigation, assess target vulnerabilities, and strategically time operations, creating operational risks for commercial shipping without engaging in direct naval confrontation.
He further explains that this hybridization blurs the lines between naval, land, and cyber warfare. Control over information, data nodes, and communications allows smaller forces to neutralize conventional superiority, fundamentally redefining power projection at sea. In this context, maritime dominance increasingly depends on informational advantage as much as on traditional firepower.
This fusion of kinetic and informational tools signaled a deeper shift in maritime war. In short, superiority at sea could now be neutralized by intelligence asymmetry on land.
By early 2024, an estimated 2,000 vessels had already diverted away from the Red Sea. Traffic through the Suez Canal collapsed from roughly 2,068 transits in November 2023 to about 877 by October 2024. War-risk insurance premiums surged from negligible levels to as much as 1% of a ship’s insured value per transit, hundreds of thousands of dollars for large vessels.
At the time, freight markets reacted instantly. Asia-Europe spot container rates jumped by up to 68%, while Asia-US routes climbed nearly 60% at their peak. Rerouted oil and gas shipments added as much as 4,000 nautical miles per journey, eroding the price advantage of Middle Eastern exports.
This was not indiscriminate disruption. Yemeni naval statements consistently framed operations as conditional, targeting “Israel”-linked shipping and tied explicitly to Gaza. As one Resistance fighter recalled, the naval option had long been reserved as a last resort. When it was finally activated, Yemen’s capabilities had matured enough to materialize the threat.
The US deployed carrier strike groups and launched sustained strikes, yet reports indicated roughly 75 percent of Yemen’s missile and drone capacity remained intact.
Dr. Abdulmalik M. Eissa observes that disrupting maritime transit, or making it conditional under non-traditional rules, has compelled the international system to recognize Sanaa as a significant actor in regional maritime security.
This development signals a structural shift in naval power, where asymmetric capabilities and the use of political and economic pressure by non-state actors are rewriting established norms of maritime sovereignty
According to Dr. Eissa, the global focus is no longer solely on securing the seas through conventional force but on whether international rules can adapt to these emerging forms of influence.
China, dependent on Red Sea trade, deepened maritime coordination with regional actors, experiencing fewer disruptions. Russia treated the region as a theater to observe Western overstretch. Thus, diplomacy, rather than firepower, increasingly defines maritime security.
Maritime disruption had global consequences: energy markets absorbed shocks as oil and LNG flows fell, and aid shipments to East Africa and Yemen slowed.
Inside Yemen, the humanitarian toll deepened. With more than 20 million people reliant on aid, maritime disruption intensified food insecurity and fuel shortages. Many Yemenis framed this suffering as a conscious sacrifice, solidarity with Gaza despite the cost, and a rejection of the Red Sea’s militarization.
Global powers aggressively responded to protect their interests, yet failed to defeat Yemen. Their intervention compounded civilian harm, in Yemen and beyond, while leaving the underlying dynamics unresolved. This crisis cannot be detached from the wider regional catastrophe, where tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed amid “Israel’s” ongoing war on Gaza, despite the signed truce.
What Yemen achieved was not traditional control of the Red Sea; it was a strategic veto. By rendering the uninterrupted transit conditional, it forced global powers to negotiate not just with fleets, but with geography and politics.
In May 2025, US President Donald Trump announced an immediate halt to US strikes on Yemen, following Omani-brokered talks. At the time, the Yemeni Armed Forces clarified that the ceasefire with the US will not end Red Sea strikes on Israeli targets, emphasizing the campaign’s original framing.
In this regard, Yemeni political writer Ali Sharaf al-Mahatwary told Al Mayadeen English that the Red Sea confrontation forced the US Navy into unexpected exhaustion, leading Washington to accept a mutual ceasefire.
Yemen scored a clear maritime victory, proving that with the will to fight, even the world’s most dominant power can be challenged
As 2026 approaches, the question is no longer whether the Red Sea can be secured solely by force. That supposition has already been debunked. The real question is whether the international system is prepared to adapt to a maritime order in which smaller actors, armed with asymmetric tools and strategic clarity, can rewrite the rules of global trade.
In short, Yemen’s Red Sea wildcard is not an anomaly. It is a preview.