National Resistance destroys explosive-laden boat near oil tanker at al-Mokha Port

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Yemeni naval patrols destroyed an explosive-laden boat as it closed on an oil tanker berthed at al-Mokha Port on the Red Sea coast on Friday evening, the government said, describing the incident as an attempted attack by Houthi forces on one of the few fuel terminals still working in territory under its control.

Patrols belonging to the National Resistance spotted the craft moving toward the shoreline near the al-Mokha power station at the same time the tanker lay at anchor inside the port. The patrols engaged the boat and detonated it before it reached the restricted zone around the berths. An assessment carried out afterwards concluded, from the force of the blast and the dense smoke that followed, that the vessel had been packed with explosives and prepared for a strike, according to the account given by Yemeni authorities. No casualties were reported and the tanker was not damaged.

The Ministry of Transport condemned the attempt in a statement, saying it endangered maritime safety, the port’s installations, the workers employed there and the marine environment of the surrounding waters. The ministry said that targeting commercial shipping in Yemeni waters amounted to a direct threat to freedom of navigation in a corridor carrying a substantial share of world trade, and it called on international maritime bodies and partner states to treat the episode as more than a local security matter.

Al-Mokha sits on Yemen’s Red Sea coast in Taiz governorate and has been held since 2017 by the National Resistance Forces commanded by Tariq Saleh, who sits on the Presidential Leadership Council. The port is modest by regional standards, but it has become important to the areas the government administers, handling fuel cargoes and commercial goods that would otherwise travel overland from Aden. Its power station supplies electricity along a stretch of coastline where generating capacity is scarce and interruptions are frequent.

The waters off al-Mokha lie close to Bab al-Mandab, the strait roughly 20 kilometres wide between Yemen and Djibouti through which vessels moving between the Suez Canal and the Indian Ocean must pass. Attacks on shipping in and around the strait since late 2023 have pushed many carriers onto the longer route around the Cape of Good Hope, lengthening voyages by days and raising insurance costs across the industry.

The environmental exposure is the element that most concerns Yemeni officials. A laden tanker struck in shallow coastal water could release oil into a semi-enclosed sea with limited natural flushing and coral systems that support local fisheries. Yemen has little domestic capacity to mount a spill response of its own. The salvage of the decaying FSO Safer tanker off Hodeidah, completed under United Nations supervision in 2023, required an international operation assembled over several years and funded by donor appeals.

The Houthi movement, which controls Sanaa and much of Yemen’s north-west, did not immediately comment on the government’s account, and the attribution rests on the assessment of Yemeni authorities. The group has previously acknowledged carrying out attacks on vessels in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, and remote-controlled boats loaded with explosives have appeared in its declared maritime arsenal alongside anti-ship missiles and armed drones.

Explosive-laden small craft are among the harder threats for a coastal force to counter. They are cheap, can be launched from almost any beach, and present a small radar signature against a background of fishing traffic, so the decision to engage often has to be taken within minutes and on incomplete information. Forces operating in the region generally rely on layered defences — surveillance of the approaches, physical barriers around berths, and rules keeping unidentified vessels at a distance — rather than on any single line of protection.

Friday’s attempt came during one of the sharper escalations of the war in months. Yemen’s defence ministry said this week that Houthi missile and drone fire had struck army camps and units in Marib and Hadramout, and Rashad al-Alimi, who chairs the Presidential Leadership Council, convened an emergency session of the National Defence Council in response. The armed forces announced on Saturday that they had begun operations against Houthi positions along several front lines.

The transport ministry restated the government’s position that protecting Yemen’s waterways and coastline is a shared responsibility rather than a purely national one, and urged allied states to widen intelligence-sharing and naval coordination. Yemeni officials have argued for some time that the naval forces patrolling the southern Red Sea are configured to protect passing merchant traffic rather than the ports on Yemen’s own shore, leaving coastal facilities to be defended by local units with limited equipment.

The stakes for civilians are considerable. United Nations agencies estimate that more than 18 million people in Yemen need humanitarian assistance and that several million remain displaced after a decade of fighting. Most of the country’s food and fuel arrives by sea, so disruption at any working port feeds quickly into market prices and into the delivery of relief supplies inland.

Port operations at al-Mokha continued after the boat was destroyed. The attempt has nonetheless renewed pressure on the government to harden the approaches to its Red Sea facilities, and it leaves open a question officials have not yet answered: whether patrol boats and shore defences alone can secure a coastline running for hundreds of kilometres alongside one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes.