The rebels have seized the strategic Hanish islands and Mayun island at the Bab el-Mandeb's mouth — the waterway Saudi Arabia now depends on to export oil while Hormuz burns.
The Houthis have gone island-hopping, and the Red Sea just got narrower.
Houthi officials said on Monday, September 28, that they had seized Greater and Lesser Hanish — two strategic islands in the southern Red Sea, bolstering their control over one of the world's key shipping routes.
The Hanish islands sit near the Bab el-Mandeb — the strait's southern gate, where the Red Sea funnels into the Gulf of Aden and every tanker bound for Suez must pass.
Three days earlier, on September 25, the rebels captured Mayun island — the tiny volcanic rock sitting directly in the Bab el-Mandeb's mouth, commanding the narrows themselves.
On September 24, they took Mokha, the Red Sea port. A port, an island, two islands: a week of advances in a war that usually measures progress in years.
The pattern is unmistakable. These are not raids. This is a siege of a waterway — positions taken and held around the choke point, one basalt rock at a time.
About 12 percent of the world's goods are typically shipped through the Bab el-Mandeb at the Red Sea's southern end — the number every logistics manager on earth has memorized this year.
The context is Hormuz. With the strait to the east burning, Saudi Arabia's oil exports depend increasingly on the Red Sea route to the west — the very corridor the Houthis are now tightening.
Mayun island matters disproportionately to its size. A few square kilometers of basalt, commanding the narrows where every tanker to Suez must thread the needle.
The Hanish islands are no better positioned — for the ships, that is. For the Houthis, the geography is a gift: fixed ground in the middle of moving water.
These are not raids. This is a siege of a waterway — positions taken and held around the choke point.
Beijing is watching — and buying. China, a major Middle East oil importer, said on September 28 that it was "deeply concerned," calling Houthi attacks on Saudi energy infrastructure "unacceptable."
That word — "unacceptable" — is diplomat-speak for "we are not neutral anymore," or at least "we would like you to think we are not." China buys the oil that sails past these islands; its patience has a price, and the price is measured in barrels.
Riyadh answered with steel. Saudi Arabia responded with airstrikes against the airport in Mokha, a Houthi broadcaster said — the retaliation arriving within hours of the advance.
Iran, meanwhile, called on Saudi Arabia to end its blockade of Yemen and return to negotiations — a statement that reads differently depending on who you believe arms the Houthis.
The Red Sea is now a two-front naval puzzle: the Bab el-Mandeb tightening in the south, Hormuz constricted in the east. Two gates, both contested, both burning.
For Egypt, the stakes are existential-adjacent: Suez Canal revenues depend on traffic that must pass the very islands the Houthis now hold. Cairo's budget has a line item riding on the Hanish islands.
For Europe's supply chains, the detour math is brutal: around the Cape of Good Hope adds weeks to a voyage and millions in fuel and freight — a tax the Houthis collect without owning a single ship.
The Houthis' calculation is plain arithmetic: control the gates, set the terms. A rebel movement with islands is a rebel movement with a navy made of geography.
Whether they can hold what they took is the open question. Islands are also traps — fixed, exposed, reachable by airpower and blockade. Mokha's airport is already rubble, or will be soon.
Airpower punishes fixed positions; the Houthis learned that lesson a decade ago, and are presumably relearning it now, in real time, over Mokha.
The week that was: a port, an island, two islands. The war's grammar is shifting from drones to territory. Watch the water, not the sky.
Western coverage — AP, the Institute for the Study of War — frames the week as a deliberate escalation: the Houthis moving from harassing shipping to occupying the waterway itself, island by island.
The emphasis is on the sequencing — Mokha on the 24th, Mayun on the 25th, the Hanish islands on the 28th — read as a campaign, not a coincidence. The ISW's mapping instinct treats each seizure as a data point in a tightening perimeter.
The Saudi airstrikes are covered as the predictable response: airpower against fixed positions, the one currency Riyadh can spend quickly. The question Western analysts ask is whether strikes can dislodge a force that has spent a decade surviving them.
The risk, in this reading, is a southern Red Sea under effective Houthi control — a second Hormuz, built one island at a time.
Eastern coverage centers on Beijing's reaction: China's "deeply concerned" and "unacceptable" are given unusual weight, read as a signal that the world's largest oil importer is losing patience with the Red Sea's instability.
Iran's call for Saudi Arabia to end the Yemen blockade and return to negotiations is covered straight — as diplomacy, not deflection. The blockade, in this telling, is the original siege; the islands are the answer.
The emphasis falls on negotiation as the only exit: airstrikes failed for a decade, the argument runs, and will fail for another. The waterway's future is a table, not a target.
The risk, in this reading, is escalation by airpower — that Riyadh's strikes widen a war diplomacy could still close.
The South — Yemeni outlets like 26SepNews among them — reads the week through the blockade's long shadow. Yemen has lived under siege conditions for years; the islands are, in this telling, the besieged pushing back.
Coverage emphasizes the human geography: Mokha is a port city with people in it, the Hanish islands have fishermen, and every airstrike has an address. The war's abstractions — "choke points," "corridors" — land on real roofs.
The 12-percent figure gets the South's full attention: the world's goods, the world's food, the world's fuel — all passing through a strait the great powers treat as a chessboard and the littoral states treat as a lifeline.
The risk, in this reading, is that the waterway becomes a permanent battlefield — and the countries that depend on it most have the least say in its fate.
