President Donald Trump announced on May 6 that U.S. forces would cease strikes targeting Yemen’s Houthis, saying the insurgent movement had finally tired of a year-and-a-half-long Red Sea stand-off.
Speaking with reporters as he hosted newly elected Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney at the White House on Tuesday, Trump said that in an overnight message, the Houthis “announced, to us at least, that they don’t want to fight anymore.”
“They just don’t want to fight, and we will honor that, and we will, we will stop the bombings, and they have capitulated,” Trump said.
Also known as Ansar Allah, the Houthis are a Zaidi Shia movement that unseated Yemen’s internationally recognized government from the capital city of Sana'a in 2014 and currently control an area encompassing about 80 percent of the country’s 32 million population.
For years, the Houthis had held out against a U.S.-backed and Saudi-led coalition of Arab Gulf states that led a military campaign to restore control of the country to its internationally recognized government.
The Yemeni internal conflict has waned in recent years, with the Houthi hold on power largely intact.
After Hamas carried out attacks across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and Israel launched a retaliatory military campaign across the Gaza Strip, the Houthis turned their attention outward and began launching missiles and attack drones at Israel and at ships transiting the Middle East waterways.
The Houthis claimed solidarity with the Palestinian cause and insisted they would continue the attacks until Israel ended its Gaza campaign.
U.S. forces were soon called into the Middle East waterways to help protect international shipping lanes.
By January of last year, the Biden administration had ordered U.S. forces to begin conducting offensive strikes across Houthi-controlled Yemen.
After Israel and Hamas reached a cease-fire agreement in January of this year, the Houthi attacks stopped.
U.S. forces, in turn, tapered off their campaign of strikes on Yemen.
In March, the Gaza cease-fire shattered, and the Houthis threatened to renew their attacks.
Around the same time, the U.S. government officially re-designated the Houthis as a foreign terrorist organization and preempted new Houthi attacks by launching a wave of missiles and aircraft to strike targets across Yemen on March 15.
Houthi representatives, who are normally active on social media, have yet to confirm that they have reached an agreement with the United States to halt hostilities.
Israeli military aircraft carried out retaliatory strikes across Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen on Monday and Tuesday.
Discussing the developments at a press briefing following Trump’s White House comments, State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce said the diplomatic breakthrough with the Houthis will end attacks targeting U.S. vessels transiting the Red Sea and its adjoining waterways.
Bruce was less clear on whether the cease-fire arrangement would bring an end to the back-and-forth attacks between Israel and Yemen.
