A US fighter jet has shot down a cruise missile fired towards an American destroyer in the Red Sea by Yemen’s Houthi rebels, officials said.
The incident is the latest attack on global shipping amid Israel’s war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
On Monday, missile fire struck a ship just off the coast of Yemen in the Gulf of Aden, officials said.
Details remained scarce on the missile strike, though it marked the latest attack roiling global shipping amid Israel’s war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Suspicion immediately fell on the Houthis.
The attack on Sunday marks the first US-acknowledged strike by the Houthis since America and allied nations began strikes on the rebels on Friday, following weeks of assaults on shipping in the Red Sea.
The Houthis have targeted the crucial corridor, which links Asian and Middle East energy and cargo shipments to the Suez Canal and onward to Europe, in retaliation over the Israel-Hamas war. The attacks threaten to widen that conflict into a regional conflagration.
The Houthis, a Shia rebel group allied with Iran that seized Yemen’s capital in 2014, did not immediately acknowledge the attack.
It was not immediately clear whether the US would retaliate for the latest attack, though President Joe Biden has said he “will not hesitate to direct further measures to protect our people and the free flow of international commerce as necessary”.
The Houthi fire on Sunday went in the direction of the USS Laboon, an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer operating in the southern reaches of the Red Sea, the American military’s Central Command said.
The missile came from near Hodeida, a Red Sea port city long held by the Houthis, the US said.
“An anti-ship cruise missile was fired from Iranian-backed Houthi militant areas of Yemen toward USS Laboon,” Central Command said. “There were no injuries or damage reported.”
The first day of US-led strikes on Friday hit 28 locations and struck more than 60 targets with cruise missiles and bombs launched by fighter jets, warships and a submarine.
Sites hit included weapon depots, radars and command centres, including in remote mountain areas, the US has said.
The Houthis have yet to acknowledge how severe the damage was from the strikes, which they said killed five of their troops and wounded six others.
US forces followed up with a strike on Saturday on a Houthi radar site.
Shipping through the Red Sea has slowed over the attacks. The US Navy on Friday warned American-flagged vessels to steer clear of areas around Yemen in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden for 72 hours after the initial air strikes.
For their part, the Houthis alleged without providing evidence that the US struck a site near Hodeida on Sunday around the same time of the cruise missile fire.
The Americans and the United Kingdom did not acknowledge conducting any strike – suggesting the blast may have been from a misfiring Houthi missile.
Since November, the rebels have repeatedly targeted ships in the Red Sea, saying they were avenging Israel’s offensive in Gaza against Hamas. But they have frequently targeted vessels with tenuous or no clear links to Israel, imperilling shipping in a key route for global trade.
Even the leader of the Lebanese militant Hezbollah group, Hassan Nasrallah, obliquely referenced the widening Houthi attacks on ships in a speech on Sunday, saying that “the sea has become battlefield of missiles, drones and warships”, and blaming the US strikes for escalating maritime tensions.
Though the Biden administration and its allies have tried to calm tensions in the Middle East for weeks and prevent any wider conflict, the strikes in the Red Sea threaten to ignite one.
Saudi Arabia, which supports the Yemeni government-in-exile that the Houthis are fighting, sought to distance itself from the attacks on Houthi sites as it tries to maintain a delicate detente with Iran as well as a ceasefire in Yemen.
The Saudi-led, US-backed war in Yemen that began in 2015 has killed more than 150,000 people, including fighters and civilians, and created one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters, killing tens of thousands more.