Pakistan condemns Houthi attack that killed its seafarers and warns over freedom of navigation

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Pakistan has condemned the missile attack that killed several of its nationals aboard a merchant ship off Yemen and warned that the escalating campaign against commercial vessels in the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden and the Bab al-Mandab Strait threatens global commerce, freedom of navigation and the security of the wider region.

The position was set out by Pakistan’s representative during a United Nations Security Council session on Yemen held on 13 August. He strongly condemned the attack on the Tihamah, a commercial vessel traversing the Bab al-Mandab, which he said had resulted in the deaths of three Pakistani crew members and one Indonesian crew member. Pakistan currently sits on the Council as an elected member, giving Islamabad a direct voice in a file that has rarely been at the centre of its foreign policy.

Alongside the condemnation, Pakistan pressed two demands. The first was that the Council act to protect seafarers in line with international law, a formulation that points to the freedom of navigation provisions of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and to Security Council resolution 2722, adopted in 2024, which called on all parties to respect navigational rights in the corridor. The second was that the Council maintain a steady focus on what the Pakistani delegate described as Yemen’s acute humanitarian needs, rather than allowing the maritime dimension to crowd out the crisis on land.

The vessel at the centre of the case, the Tanzania-flagged and Egyptian-owned Tihamah, was struck as it approached port near Mokha on Yemen’s Red Sea coast. Yemeni government officials reported that four crew members and two Yemeni rescuers were killed and about ten people injured. Survivors told news agencies that a second missile landed while rescue work was under way, adding casualties among those who had come to help. Yemeni authorities attribute the strike to the Houthi movement.

The presence of Pakistani nationals among the dead is not incidental. The global merchant fleet is crewed disproportionately by seafarers from South and Southeast Asia, and the human cost of attacks on shipping therefore falls heavily on countries far removed from the conflicts that generate them. Governments in the region have repeatedly raised this asymmetry at the International Maritime Organization, whose Secretary-General, Arsenio Dominguez, condemned the Tihamah attack as an indefensible assault on international shipping and urged owners and operators to reassess the risks of transiting the strait.

The attack forms part of a sharply escalating pattern. On 20 July the Houthis announced what they described as a naval blockade of Saudi Arabia, saying they would target Saudi-linked vessels moving through the Red Sea and the Bab al-Mandab. The Secretary-General’s latest report to the Council recorded attacks on three vessels in July and early August: the Saudi-flagged Encelia on 22 July, the NCC Ghazal on 28 July and the Dominica-flagged Daisy on 5 August. The United States representative told the same session that more than seven Saudi-linked ships had been targeted in recent weeks.

The commercial stakes are difficult to overstate. The Bab al-Mandab links the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden and carries roughly twelve per cent of world trade by most estimates. Sustained risk in the strait pushes shipowners towards war-risk insurance premiums that can multiply voyage costs, or towards rerouting around the Cape of Good Hope, a diversion that adds thousands of nautical miles and days of sailing time between Asia and Europe. Much of the industry has operated under some version of that calculation since attacks intensified in late 2023.

Other Council members made similar arguments in different registers. Greece described the security of navigation across the corridor as a matter of critical international importance. Bahrain’s representative called for a clear and firm stance to protect seafarers and hold those responsible to account, warning that inaction would embolden further attacks. France said it would remain engaged through the European Union’s Operation Aspides, launched in 2024 to protect commercial shipping in the corridor.

The humanitarian point Pakistan raised was underlined at the same meeting by Tom Fletcher, the United Nations Emergency Relief Coordinator. He told the Council that six million people in Yemen are experiencing emergency levels of deprivation, the highest figure anywhere in the world, and that nearly eleven million women and girls require humanitarian support. The country’s humanitarian appeal, he said, is barely a fifth funded, and the consequence of that shortfall is measured in reduced rations, closed clinics and services that simply stop.

The UN Special Envoy for Yemen, Hans Grundberg, framed the maritime attacks as part of a broader danger. He warned the Council that Yemen faces a more serious risk of a return to large-scale conflict than at any point since the truce mediated by the United Nations in 2022, and said assaults on commercial vessels risk deepening the country’s entanglement with the wider regional confrontation.

For Islamabad, the episode illustrates how a conflict in which it is not a party can still reach its citizens. Pakistan maintains working relationships with both Iran and Saudi Arabia and has generally avoided taking sides in Yemen’s war, which makes its intervention at the Council notable less for its rhetoric than for its subject: the safety of merchant crews. The session ended without agreement on any new Council measure, leaving the protection of those crews where it has largely rested since 2023, with naval coalitions, flag states and shipowners.