Houthi strike kills seafarers on Red Sea cargo ship
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- Houthi fighters struck the deck cargo ship Tihamah off southern Yemen on Tuesday, killing several seafarers in what IMO Secretary-General Arsenio Dominguez called an "indefensible attack on international shipping."
- The Tihamah, a 62.8-metre, 11-metre-wide Tanzanian-flagged vessel, was attacked in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden — a region where the Houthis claimed to have struck two Saudi oil tankers on 23 July.
- The strike compounds a near-total Strait of Hormuz shipping freeze, with only about seven ships transiting on Sunday — nearly 20 times below the pre-war daily average — following US and Israeli strikes on Iran and Tehran's counter-strikes across Gulf States and Jordan.
- Plunging exports of oil, gas, and fertilizer inputs have driven prices higher, while an IMO-coordinated evacuation plan remains on hold, leaving roughly 6,000 crew members and 500 vessels stranded near the strait.
- The IMO's Hormuz crisis tracker records 65 confirmed incidents and 17 seafarers killed since early March, with around 2,900 of the trapped seafarers evacuated to date.
- UN Secretary-General António Guterres had previously expressed "deep alarm" about the resumption of Houthi attacks on commercial vessels after the 23 July Saudi tanker strikes.
Why it matters: With Red Sea shipping already hit by a Houthi strike killing seafarers and Hormuz traffic down roughly 20-fold from pre-war levels, oil, gas, and fertilizer flows are plunging and prices rising — meaning two of the world's most critical chokepoints are simultaneously compromised, and the trapped 6,000 seafarers remain stranded with the evacuation plan suspended.
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