For nearly three years, the strategy of the Houthis in the Red Sea was to use ambush tactics without actually having to control the land they were claiming. Cheap drones fired from hidden positions on the Yemeni coast have been forcing warships and cargo carriers to sail in fear of an enemy that never had to hold ground, but that story changed in the light of their recent attacks, once they chose to switch to a more conventional but very dangerous type of warfare.
Between September 10 and 14, the Iran-backed rebel forces seized the port city of Mokha, captured the strategic Perim Island that splits the Bab el-Mandeb Strait in two, and took the Greater and Lesser Hanish islands further north in the southern Red Sea, reportedly their biggest territorial gains in years, according to the Associated Press. Four Yemeni government sources told Reuters that Houthi forces reached Perim on Friday, while government troops confirmed they had withdrawn from the island and from the coastal town of Dhubab facing it. More than 80,000 people have been displaced in just two weeks of fighting, with some fleeing by boat to Djibouti, according to UN estimates, cited by Euronews.
The timing is not incidental at all. With the Strait of Hormuz being under an intermittent US-Iran blockade since the war that began in February, Saudi Arabia has been trying actively to reroute its oil exports through the Red Sea as an alternative to the blocked chokepoint, without anticipating that the Houthis have now moved to physically control the Suez-Bab el-Mandeb corridor, rather than merely threaten it.
This is no longer the sea denial campaign that the international community knew and got used to avoid, it is something closer to a traditional land grab with maritime consequences, and it deserves to be understood as a distinct, more dangerous phase of the same conflict.
A Chokepoint Within a Chokepoint
The Bab el-Mandeb has always been more than a stretch of open water. This crucial bottleneck represents a critical connection point between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. With a total width of just 32 km (around 20 nautical miles) it is a water connection that separates Yemen from its African neighbors, Djibouti and Eritrea, but the strait is further divided by Perim Island, creating the eastern and western channels, with the latter being mostly used by commercial vessels and measuring approximately 26 km in width and 300 m in depth, while the eastern channel is only 3 km wide.
Since the eastern part is used mainly for local coastal guard because of its shallow depth and the presence of coral reefs, the main passage artery remains the western one, called Dact-el-Mayun or The Great Passage. Modern commercial ships are therefore constrained by hydrographic realities: their draft prevents them from using the alternative channel without considerable operational costs.
What was, until last week, a geographic curiosity in academic literature on maritime chokepoints is now a newly opened front in the wider Middle Eastern conflict, and recently it is closer than ever to have a de facto owner. The island that determines which channel commercial traffic is even able to use is no longer a neutral piece of geography, it has become in the span of a few days Houthi-held territory. Reuters reported that a full Houthi grip on the strait could give Iran a significant advantage in their own conflict by drastically diminishing the ability of the US forces to get supplies through a second major maritime corridor, alongside the already-blockaded Hormuz.
Sea Denial’s Next Stage
To understand why this matters, we are required to comprehend the distinction that has defined Houthi strategy since 2023. The military strategy of the Houthis can be better understood through the difference between sea control and sea denial tactics. Their regional enemy, Saudi Arabia, uses a strategy of sea control to not just use the Red Sea for commercial purposes, but to dominate it through military naval superiority, complex alliances and heavy infrastructure. On the other hand, the rebels don’t need to fully control it, they just need to target strategic pressure points, to convey the feeling of uncertainty for all the ships that cross their waters, in order to project instability in the entire region.
That doctrine assumed that the weak actor only needs to be considered a credible threat and that it never needs territorial control; a framework that is rather built on the absence of capabilities: no navy, no fixed positions, no target for conventional retaliation. What happened in the past week breaks that logic, because by physically occupying Mokha, Perim, and the Hanish islands, the Houthis have upgraded their sea denial strategy. They no longer need to guess where a tanker will pass and fire blindly toward it from the Yemeni shore. They can now watch the only navigable channel from a position they physically hold, adjusting pressure at will rather than through sporadic strikes or hit and run tactics.
This is a hybrid that the classical sea control/sea denial theory does not fully capture, namely a non-state actor achieving something resembling territorial sea control, without a single warship, simply by holding the coastline and the islands that geography made indispensable. The capture of Mokha creates the possibility for other territorial advances towards the Bab el-Mandeb and an even tighter grip on the maritime traffic between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean; in other words, the sea denial is evolving, in real time, into something closer to de facto control over access to the strait.
One Flank, Two Chokepoints
The strait was never going to stay isolated from the wider conflict, since in the war architecture of 2026, Tehran has consolidated its grip on the two major gateways for exporting petroleum and natural gas: the Strait of Hormuz and the Strait of Bab el-Mandeb. Whether through direct coordination or opportunistic alignment, this dual pressure appears designed to undermine Western maritime superiority and force concessions in the broader US-Iran confrontation.
This unity in actions forces the combatants to view the region not as two different issues that need to be tackled separately, but as an entire mechanism of security that is interconnected, where an action in the Strait of Hormuz can trigger proportionate instability in the Red Sea.
The pattern became more visible after Saudi Arabia tried to shift more of its oil exports to the Red Sea route to avoid the Hormuz blockade and the Houthis struck two tankers carrying their crude oil in July. This does not by itself prove direct Iranian-Houthi coordination, but it illustrates how pressure at the two chokepoints can reinforce one another. The alternative route Saudi Arabia built its contingency planning around is now the one the Houthis are working to physically seal off, since Iran does not need to close Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb simultaneously through direct military action, they only need an ally capable of doing the second job while Tehran manages the first.
When Sovereignty Stops at the Shore
None of this would be possible without the deeper condition of power vacuum; in the past few years we have witnessed the near-total absence of a Yemeni state capable of defending its own coastline. The territorial fragmentation of Yemen is even more acute when we take into consideration its shores and territorial waters, where control over different ports and naval infrastructures has become the stake in the fight between the two conflicting regimes.
The state collapse has also translated into the severe weakening of the Yemeni Coast Guard (YCG) that has been under institutional reconstruction by the United Nations and other international organizations for more than 6 years, leaving the territorial waters under a lack of sovereignty that prevents any kind of surveillance.
The speed of the recent collapse illustrates exactly this vacuum in practice, not in theory. A senior commander in Yemen’s government forces, Maj. Gen. Tareq Saleh, described his own withdrawal from the Bab el-Mandeb front as a „strategic retreat” rather than a defeat, a discourse that only underscores how little capacity remained to hold the line in the first place, especially since tens of thousands of people fled their homes in the days that followed. There was no coast guard to fall back on, no naval reserve to reinforce the islands, only a government whose presence on the Red Sea coast had already been more symbolic than operational for years.
Who Pays, and How
Egypt suffers the most from this crisis and has the fewest options to react. According to its Foreign Ministry cited by Egypt Today, Cairo has already lost about $10.5 billion in Suez Canal revenues since 2023, with monthly losses that at points reached $800 million. The authorities have been cautiously projecting a recovery through 2026 as some shipping lines began returning to the route, according to the same source, but a prolonged Houthi hold on the strait’s southern approach threatens to reverse that recovery before it consolidates, pushing more container and tanker traffic back around the Cape of Good Hope. The diversion of maritime routes around Africa not only adds thousands of miles and approximately 14 to 25 days in delay, but also increases the carbon emissions and the fuel cost up to 1 million dollars.
A critical quantitative indicator is also the evolution of prices for insurance premiums, which have also soared since the first Houthi attacks. Before the start of the Red Sea crisis, the average war insurance premium was around 0.05% from the total cost of the ship and in many cases some companies would even eliminate that. Now, war-risk premiums for vessels transiting the Red Sea had already climbed to over 1% earlier this summer, after the Houthis first declared a naval blockade against Saudi Arabia in July, with rates for vessels calling at Saudi Red Sea ports quoted as high as 3%. By seizing Perim and the Hanish islands, the rebels now permanently overlook the main shipping channel, and for maritime insurers, this fixed threat is much more serious than random attacks, meaning shipping insurance costs will inevitably surge.
European markets are not exempt from the negative consequences of this crisis, and for the Black Sea-Suez corridor specifically, the exposure is indirect but real. Roughly 15% of global wheat exports move through Bab el-Mandeb, and a significant part of it is originating in Eastern Europe. Constanța has handled part of Ukraine’s rerouted grain since 2022, but the port is already stretched thin. Total traffic dropped from 77.5 million tonnes in 2024 to 67 million in 2025, with Ukrainian grain falling over 43%.
While the Red Sea crisis does not send extra ships directly to Constanța, it makes global cargo ships rarer, insurance pricier, and fuel more expensive. As a result, Romanian and regional grain exporters face higher shipping costs and tighter deal deadlines, even if traffic through the Bosphorus remains unchanged.
The Dangerous Lesson of Bab el-Mandeb
The open question is whether this is a temporary wartime land grab, tied strictly to the leverage Iran needs in its confrontation with Washington, or whether it marks a permanent redrawing of who actually controls one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes. Either answer is uncomfortable. If it is temporary, it confirms that a non-state actor can seize sovereign maritime chokepoints whenever a state collapses and a patron is willing to back the move; if it is permanent, the Bab el-Mandeb, and possibly the logic behind it, becomes an example of how the next chokepoint crisis is likely to unfold: not with a rival navy, but with a militia holding the right island at the right moment.
What we can say for sure is that the framework the world used to make sense of Houthi behavior for the past two years, a weak actor denying access without ever needing to hold ground, no longer describes what is happening on the map. The costs already being counted in London insurance markets, in Cairo’s treasury, and in the freight quotes reaching exporters thousands of kilometers away confirm that this is not a localized Yemeni story anymore, if it ever was. The Houthis do not just deny the Red Sea. As of this month, in the most literal sense, they occupy part of it, and the rest of the world is already paying to find out what that means.
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