Yemen’s Houthis direct hit without deaths on another ship in Red Sea. US confirms new strike despite world’s “BEST” naval deterrent
Yemen’s Houthi rebels have claimed responsibility for a missile attack on a Malta-flagged cargo ship in the Red Sea as the United States says it has launched a new strike on Houthi targets amid soaring tensions around the key waterway.
“A Malta-flagged, Greek-owned bulk carrier, the Zografia was reportedly targeted and impacted with a missile while transiting the southern Red Sea northbound,” the maritime risk management company Ambrey said in an alert on Tuesday.
The Houthis have attacked dozens of vessels since November, including the bulk carrier Zografia on January 16, 2024 [File: Courtesy: MarineTraffic.com]
The Houthis’ military spokesperson, Yahya Sarea, said in a statement that the Yemeni rebels targeted the Zografia ship with naval missiles on Tuesday as it was heading to Israel, resulting in a “direct hit”.
@wlsfargo Gone are the days of aircraft carriers. Ancient history, my friend. Hypersonic missiles render them totally obsolete.
There were no reports of injuries. The vessel had been heading north to the Suez Canal when it was attacked, the Greek Ministry of Shipping and Island Policy said.
Earlier on Tuesday, the US military said it launched a new strike against the Houthis, hitting anti-ship missiles in the third assault on the Iran-backed group in recent days.
According to a US Central Command statement, the strike destroyed four Houthi ballistic missiles that were prepared to launch and presented an imminent threat to merchant and US navy ships in the region.
The Houthi attack on the Zografia involved an anti-ship ballistic missile, the statement said, adding that the ship continued its Red Sea transit after being hit and saying it remained seaworthy.
The Iran-backed Houthis have attacked what they say are Israel-linked commercial vessels since November, disrupting maritime trade routes. The Houthis say the attacks are a response to Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.
The group has threatened to expand the range of targets of its attacks in the Red Sea to include US ships in response to American and British strikes on its sites in Yemen.
On Sunday, US forces shot down a Houthi cruise missile targeting a US destroyer, and on Monday, a US-owned cargo ship in the Gulf of Oman was hit by a missile.
Al Jazeera’s Hashem Ahelbarra said the tensions in the Red Sea could “degenerate into something bigger, particularly the potential of war for an Iranian-American confrontation in Yemen”.
“We’re talking about an extremely delicate situation in the Red Sea,” Ahelbarra said.
Earlier, Qatar’s prime minister said liquefied natural gas (LNG) shipments would be affected by Red Sea tensions and warned that the strikes on Yemen risk worsening the crisis.
“LNG is … as any other merchant shipments. They will be affected by that [exchange with the Houthis],” Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani told the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
“There are alternative routes. Those alternative routes are not more efficient; they’re less efficient than the current route,” he added.
On Monday, the Bloomberg news agency reported that at least five LNG vessels used by Qatar had stopped on their way to the Red Sea.
“[Military intervention] will not bring an end for this, will not contain it. So the contrary, I think [it] will create … a further escalation,” the prime minister added.
Source: Al Jazeera and news agencies
The blocking of key LNG and oil shipments directly affects Europe but may favour the US.
comment: Due to sanctions on Russian gas and the US destruction of Northstream Europe is already largely dependent on highly expensive and doubly CO2 polluting US LNG supplies derived from fracking. With the Suez canal now blocked due to the Houthi blockade and insurance hikes the cost of Qatari and other LNG may shoot up to US levels, making more European industry uneconomicbut promoting US LNG.
A shadowy network of dark-money junktanks is delivering the same disastrous political package around the world.
There are elements of fascism, elements borrowed from the Chinese state and elements that reflect Argentina’s history of dictatorship. But most of the programme for government announced by Javier Milei, the demagogic new Argentinian president, feels eerily familiar, here in the northern hemisphere.
A crash programme of massive cuts; demolishing public services; privatising public assets; centralising political power; sacking civil servants; sweeping away constraints on corporations and oligarchs; destroying regulations that protect workers, vulnerable people and the living world; supporting landlords against tenants; criminalising peaceful protest; restricting the right to strike. Anything ring a bell?
Milei is attempting, with a vast “emergency” decree and a monster “reform bill”, what the Conservatives have done in the UK over 45 years. The crash programme bears striking similarities to Liz Truss’s “mini” (maxi) budget, which trashed the prospects of many poor and middle-class people and exacerbated the turmoil that now dominates public life.
Coincidence? Not at all. Milei’s programme was heavily influenced by Argentinian neoliberal thinktanks belonging to something called the Atlas Network, a global coordinating body that promotes broadly the same political and economic package everywhere it operates. It was founded in 1981 by a UK citizen, Antony Fisher. Fisher was also the founder of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), one of the first members of the Atlas Network.
The IEA created, to a remarkable degree, Liz Truss’s political platform. In a video conversation on the day of her “mini” budget with another member of the institute, its then director general, Mark Littlewood, observed: “We’re on the hook for it now. If it doesn’t work it’s your fault and mine.” It didn’t work – in fact, it crashed spectacularly, at great cost to us all – but, thanks to the UK’s media, the BBC included, which continue to treat these fanatical corporate lobbyists as purveyors of holy writ, they’re off the hook.
Last year, the IEA was platformed on British media an average of 14 times a day: even more often than before the disaster it helped inflict on the UK. Scarcely ever was it challenged about who funds it or whom it represents. The three peers nominated by Truss in her resignation honours list have all worked for or with organisations belonging to the Atlas Network (Matthew Elliott, TaxPayers’ Alliance; Ruth Porter, IEA and Policy Exchange; Jon Moynihan, IEA).
Now, like US supreme court justices, they have been granted lifelong powers to shape our lives, without democratic consent. Truss also put forward Littlewood, but his reward for wrecking people’s lives was blocked by the House of Lords appointments commission.
Nothing has been learned: these corporate lobby groups still mould our politics. Policy Exchange, which, as Rishi Sunak has admitted, “helped us draft” the UK’s vicious new anti-protest laws, is also a member of the Atlas Network.
What US foreign policy shamelessly amounts to is this: ‘We make the rules so we get to break the rules.”
Have you heard the one about the U.S. government wanting a “rules-based international order”?
It’s grimly laughable, but the nation’s media outlets routinely take such claims seriously and credulously. Overall, the default assumption is that top officials in Washington are reluctant to go to war, and do so only as a last resort.
The framing was typical when the New York Times just printed this sentence at the top of the front page: “The United States and a handful of its allies on Thursday carried out military strikes against more than a dozen targets in Yemen controlled by the Iranian-backed Houthi militia, U.S. officials said, in an expansion of the war in the Middle East that the Biden administration had sought to avoid for three months.”
So, from the outset, the coverage portrayed the U.S.-led attack as a reluctant action—taken after exploring all peaceful options had failed—rather than an aggressive act in violation of international law.
On Thursday, President Biden issued a statement that sounded righteous enough, saying “these strikes are in direct response to unprecedented Houthi attacks against international maritime vessels in the Red Sea.”
He did not mention that the Houthi attacks have been in response to Israel’s murderous siege of Gaza. In the words of CNN, they “could be intended to inflict economic pain on Israel’s allies in the hope they will pressure it to cease its bombardment of the enclave.”
In fact, as Common Dreams reported, Houthi forces “began launching missiles and drones toward Israel and attacking shipping traffic in the Red Sea in response to Israel’s Gaza onslaught.” And as Trita Parsi at the Quincy Institute pointed out, “the Houthis have declared that they will stop” attacking ships in the Red Sea “if Israel stops” its mass killing in Gaza.
But that would require genuine diplomacy—not the kind of solution that appeals to President Biden or Secretary of State Antony Blinken. The duo has been enmeshed for decades, with lofty rhetoric masking the tacit precept that might makes right.
(The approach was implicit midway through 2002, when then-Senator Biden chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s hearings that promoted support for the U.S. to invade Iraq; at the time, Blinken was the committee’s chief of staff.)
Now, in charge of the State Department, Blinken is fond of touting the need for a “rules-based international order.” During a 2022 speech in Washington, he proclaimed the necessity “to manage relations between states, to prevent conflict, to uphold the rights of all people.”
Two months ago, he declared that G7 nations were united for “a rules-based international order.”
But for more than three months, Blinken has provided a continuous stream of facile rhetoric to support the ongoing methodical killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Days ago, behind a podium at the U.S. Embassy in Israel, he defended that country despite abundant evidence of genocidal warfare, claiming that “the charge of genocide is meritless.
The Houthis are avowedly in solidarity with Palestinian people, while the U.S. government continues to massively arm the Israeli military that is massacring civilians and systematically destroying Gaza. Blinken is so immersed in Orwellian messaging that—several weeks into the slaughter—he tweeted that the United States and its G7 partners “stand united in our condemnation of Russia’s war in Ukraine, in support of Israel’s right to defend itself in accordance with international law, and in maintaining a rules-based international order.”
There’s nothing unusual about extreme doublethink being foisted on the public by the people running U.S. foreign policy. What they perpetrate is a good fit for the description of doublethink in George Orwell’s novel 1984: “To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it . . .”
After news broke about the attack on Yemen, a number of Democrats and Republicans in the House quickly spoke up against Biden’s end-run around Congress, flagrantly violating the Constitution by going to war on his own say-so.
Some of the comments were laudably clear, but perhaps none more so than a statement by candidate Joe Biden on Jan. 6, 2020: “A president should never take this nation to war without the informed consent of the American people.”
Like that disposable platitude, all the Orwellian nonsense coming from the top of the U.S. government about seeking a “rules-based international order” is nothing more than a brazen PR scam.
The vast quantity of official smoke-blowing now underway cannot hide the reality that the United States government is the most powerful and dangerous outlaw nation in the world.
A powerful starting place for waking people to their imminent danger from the deceptive jab campaign is the FACT of vaccinated people dying excessively.
Once this barrier to awareness is demolished for those still happy to trust government ‘experts’, it may be easier to alert them to the jab as the cause.
Clare Pain is an Australian investigative journalist dedicated to raising awareness of rising all cause mortality. She has worked tirelessly to expose the deadly jeopardy for the jabbed. Her end of year substack has a modest but very powerful list of 4 resources which are accessible and credible.
They comprise several videos and a free link to an expertly crafted downloadable publication from the Australian Medical Professional Society. One of the videos includes Dr Denis Rancourt, who has also a brief presentation that has gone viral here on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Once we understand that jabbed people are dying suddenly (and many more are suffering serious and long term injuries), and that the injections are by far the most likely explanation, then we may be able to prevent any more harm and bring criminal charges, if indicated, when the evidence is examined. But only if enough people raise their voices and clamour for change.
Clare’s careful and thorough work can be seen at the following sites:
Please recommend her work, and this post, to anyone who is struggling to believe that anything could be wrong with the rollout. NZDSOS has been presenting the proof – and causes – since before NZ’s jab campaign. Let’s join together and stop the carnage!
LATE NEWS..NOTE: According to an investigation by A Infos there are now BIG DOUBTS that FAUDA is a genuine Palestinian group..read the details HERE https://www.ainfos.ca/en/ainfos50511.html
The eternal promise of the young generation of anarchism
A report on the latest events from the Gaza comrades
A report on the latest developments from the West Bank comrades
The eternal promise of the young generation of anarchism
Anarchism is a vital strategy for all generations in the world. Modeling this strategy by the Palestinian youth of the FAUDA movement made the young Palestinian generation feel more responsible against the oppressive apartheid of Zionism. This magazine is edited by the Palestinian Anarchist Movement FAUDA, to inform those outside Palestine about the situation inside Palestine.
Before the current war, our comrades in Gaza cooperated very well to spread anti-apartheid thinking, especially in opposition to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) headed by Mahmoud Abbas. The rest of the comrades in the West Bank and the occupied territories of 1948 were also at a high level of training and operational coordination. With the start of the war on October 7, 2023, the FAUDA movement turned all its attention to Gaza.
Today, Palestine is the frontline of freedom fighters around the world, and Gaza is like its heart. In a situation where the cruel Zionist enemy spares no weapons, missiles or fighters against the innocent people of Gaza and attacks our brothers and sisters in Gaza day and night, we must stand with the people of Gaza. Everyone must show their loyalty to the cause of Palestine in any way they can, whether with material or spiritual help, through cyberspace or international demonstrations.
Palestinian youth in the West Bank and the 48 territories have coherent and active structures to help reach Gaza. Furthermore, the fight against the oppressive Zionist forces, whether it is the usurping settlers or the Israeli military forces, is persistently carried out by the youth in all its forms: clarification and clarification of various Palestinian issues, holding demonstrations and defense of the rights of innocent Palestinian prisoners. The world should know that the real demon of apartheid is doing what he wants today against the innocent people of Palestine, and international organizations and the United Nations are doing nothing!
We are proud to stand with freedom fighters from all over the world. world in the fight for freedom, and from here we announce that you too are a partner in our united front against Zionism.
Young people who support anarchism throughout Palestine have dedicated their entire lives and efforts to the struggle. This is the duty of all of us, this is our homeland, and we will sacrifice our lives for the freedom of our people and homeland. Every day in every corner of Palestine we have harsh conflicts with the Zionist military forces. Every day, some of our friends are martyred or wounded, but we continue on our path. We have shown that we support Moqavamah and believe that it is the only way to save and liberate the people and Palestine.
A report on the latest developments from the Gaza comrades
At least 23,084 Palestinians have been killed and another 58,926 have been injured in continued Israeli bombing of the Gaza Strip since October 7.
Israeli forces shelled the eastern part of Khan Younis and the central Gaza Strip on Monday amid ground clashes.
Israel declared that four soldiers were killed in Gaza on Monday, bringing the total number of casualties to 182.
People carrying the bodies of their loved ones through water, children soaked and barefoot, families huddled around bonfires struggling to stay warm… These are just some of the images we are seeing in Gaza this winter.
With more than 80% of the population currently displaced, according to the UN, and many living in tents, the arrival of winter in Gaza significantly worsens the already serious humanitarian crisis.
As the war on Gaza continues, we look at the science of empathy and ask why it puts a limit on human compassion. Throughout Israel’s war against Gaza, there have been calls to remember the names of those who lost their lives and to remember that they are not just numbers.
However, as the death toll continues to rise, the dead become numbers in the minds of those outside the war. It is a response known as psychic numbing. Why during mass atrocities or suffering can it sometimes seem difficult to feel true empathy?
The stated objectives of the war against Gaza are to eliminate the Hamas movement, recover its captives and carry out the plan of displacement, but we would like to tell you that the enemy, despite the destruction and massacres, has not achieved any of its war objectives.
The Hamas movement exists throughout the national territory and abroad, as well as in the conscience of the Umma and the free peoples of the world, so it cannot be eliminated.
We believe that the occupying State, after committing all these massacres, has only managed to expose its murderous and bloodthirsty face to the entire world.
After about 100 days, Israeli intelligence, its spy drones and its Western ally (the US) have failed to free a single captive from Gaza, the only way for Israeli detainees to leave Gaza alive is when they all Palestinian prisoners be released from Israeli jails.
Israel controls all access to and from the Gaza Strip. This means that Palestinians living there often cannot receive medical care unless it occurs in Gaza. However, there are not enough medical professionals or training opportunities to provide comprehensive medical care and keep pace with the demand for health problems caused by lack of food, water, sanitation and frequent periods of conflict.
Furthermore, Gaza is also facing crises when it comes to electricity, fuel and water, all of which are essential for many medical procedures. Without these resources, doctors and healthcare professionals in Gaza cannot help patients in need. Many medical centers in Gaza have had to stop due to lack of fuel, and around 20% of the necessary medicines and equipment were missing.
Due to the humanitarian circumstances faced by Palestinians in Gaza, the main way they receive medical care is through medical aid, which in most cases is provided by non-profit organizations and charities.
Through new medical centers, medical training programs, and medical missions, these organizations help provide crucial services to Palestinians who would not otherwise have access to them.
This includes access to mental health resources, as a third of the Gaza Strip’s population needs psychological and social support, mainly due to living in a war zone during the conflict with Israel.
Report of the latest developments by West Bank comrades
Live ammunition fired by Israeli forces wounded a young Palestinian late Monday night in the town of Qaffin, north of Tulkarem, local sources reported.
Israeli forces shot and killed three Palestinian youths: Yusuf Ali Al-Kholi, 22, Ahed Salman Mousa, 23, and Tareq Amjad Shahin, 24, in the town of Iktaba, east of the city of Tulkarem, on Monday; a fourth was detained by forces despite having been wounded by a gunshot.
An Israeli military vehicle ran over one of these men after shooting him
National and Islamic factions declared a general strike in Tulkarem on Tuesday in mourning for the three dead Palestinians.
Night raids on Anabta, Kafr al-Labad, Qalqilya, Nablus, Husan, west of Bethlehem, Atara, north of Ramallah, and several cities and towns in Jenin.
At a time when its military forces are focused on waging war against Hamas in the south and deterring Hezbollah in the north, Israel is relieved that the West Bank has not become a full-scale battlefield.
However, Israeli troops continue to conduct daily operations to suppress violence in the West Bank, while the number of Palestinian fatalities continues to rise, creating a fragile situation that will require officials to closely monitor developments in local security and political durability of the Palestinian Authority.
According to data from the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet), since October there have been 128 significant Moqavamah attacks in the West Bank (or in some cases from there), both in the north of the territory and in the south.
The vast majority of them were shootings, followed by stabbings, vehicle attacks, explosions and rocket fire. In this context, Moqavamah has attempted to mobilize West Bankers – especially the younger generation – to open another front against Israel.
For this reason, statements by senior Hamas officials, the media and social networks insist on the strategic relationship between the Gaza war and the advancement of the entire Palestinian nationalist and religious program, not only the release of prisoners, but also the end of the occupation and fears that the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem is in danger.
The PA’s main concern is its negative image in the eyes of Palestinians, most of whom consider her an agent of Israel and increasingly support its archenemy Hamas. According to a recent survey by Arab World for Research and Development (AWRAD) in Ramallah, 83% of West Bank respondents support Hamas’ October 7 attack and 88% believe the group is playing a positive role.
Most also support the various groups that carry out local terrorist attacks, including Hamas’s Izz aldin al-Qassam Brigades (95%), Palestinian Islamic Jihad (93%), and al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades ( 87%). In contrast, the majority disapprove of the role played by the PA and Fatah (85% and 70%, respectively), while 57% perceive the current war as a war directed against all Palestinians.
Other surveys by Washington Institute researchers have delved into the nuanced reasons why these feelings exist, and why they can rise and fall rapidly with changing political and security circumstances.
For example, in a speech on November 29, Abbas declared that the world must not stand idly by in the face of “deliberate and systematic harm to the Palestinian people,” arguing that the only way to maintain stability and regional peace is to put end the occupation and realize Palestinian rights.
However, beneath this implicit support for groups that actively oppose the Israeli occupation, many PA officials privately hope that the IDF will succeed in crushing Hamas and killing its leaders, the only scenario in which the PA I could return to Gaza.
To facilitate this goal, in recent weeks the PA has played an increasingly important security role throughout the West Bank. Its forces act as a containment factor, preventing the population from going out to confront Israeli troops during IDF counterterrorism operations.
The PA justifies this approach by telling the population that it is protecting them from Israel’s “trigger-happy” approach.
The state of public opinion in Israel has its own messages, so that according to the latest survey conducted on November 14 by an Israeli university, only 4% of respondents consider Netanyahu a reliable source of information on the Gaza war .
In another poll on October 30, only 20% of the Israeli public expressed confidence in Netanyahu’s cabinet. This index is the lowest level of trust in a prime minister and his cabinet on an issue as important as war. From now on, the murmurs about his change after the end of the war have started from the parties for and against.
Saturday’s large march of prisoners’ relatives toward Israel’s prime minister has further complicated the situation for Netanyahu. Netanyahu knows that without significant changes in circumstances, his fall is certain, and this raises the possibility of catastrophes in Gaza.
Until now, the armed to the teeth and lawless army, which during 95 days of war with Palestinian guerrillas devoid of the minimum facilities, has not been able to achieve even a little, is a failed army more than anything else. To this we must add the Shafa hospital scandal.
Attacking hospital rooms with a tank and finding nothing is a moral scandal and an informational scandal. Let us not forget that Israel has listening and espionage systems in Gaza as powerful as the bombs it has dropped. We believe that after 95 days of war, the failure of intelligence at the Shafa hospital and the failure to find the location of the Israeli prisoners up to this point is probably no less than the failure of October 7.
We continue to believe that the extent of the operations and crimes committed in Gaza is more than a symbol of Israel’s military power, it is a clear symbol of the weakness of the war, and of the fear of Israeli soldiers along with its anti-human nature.
Furthermore, the current deplorable reality is a symbol of the weakness of the system and of the international laws and values claimed by the West to control crises and defend human rights, especially of “non-whites.”
Even now, with the results of the Shefa Hospital operation uncertain, the most populated areas of Gaza, as well as southern Gaza, which also includes part of the northern population, are likely to be attacked. Let us not forget that in previous wars, Israel has focused on creating a human disaster and killing a large number of children or citizens in one place to create a lot of psychological burden and increase the cost of resistance with destruction and destruction and unforgettable bitterness. .
Netanyahu is running out of time, and Israel’s international supporters, including the United States, are said to have given him a limited deadline to bring the war to an end under the pressure of public opinion.
It is not unlikely that within this time frame the scope and intensity of Israel’s violence will increase. Even in the situation of approaching an agreement in the negotiations, we see that Israel has finished its work with a great tragedy or massacre like that of Qana.
Unfortunately, there was no news in the world about the bombing of the Al-Fakhora school in the Jabalia area, or the order to quickly evacuate the refugees to the Shafa hospital and the city of Khan Younis with hundreds of thousands of people. who have taken refuge there.
In this situation and scenario, governments and public opinion around the world remain responsible. Any kind of silence today increases the likelihood of future disasters, and every shout increases the likelihood of a ceasefire.
What is life?
We have been fighting in Palestine for years to be able to experience it one day.
Recently, the alleged Palestinian anarchist organization Fauda (Chaos; the same name as the popular Netflix series) has gained popularity among Western leftist activists. … We carefully studied the content of their media channels. Doubts were raised by the fact that no real evidence of the existence of Fauda was found. No photographs from any protests in Palestine, even with masks or painted faces, no leaflets pasted on the walls……….
Por: Henry Pacheco* En medio de un nuevo y álgido choque de la resistencia palestina con la ocupación del régimen israelí, no nos sorprende ver una vez más el triste papel de doble rasero y genuflexión al lobby sionista en los medios masivos y la política, agitando la teoría de los dos demonios. Queda claro que nadie […]
The Free 