Houthis pledge not to attack US vessels in Red Sea

A senior Houthi official said on Sunday that the group has assured the Trump administration it will not attack US vessels in the Red Sea. He also warned other countries against joining Saudi Arabia in Yemen's revived civil war.

Mohamed al-Bukhaiti, a member of the Houthis' political bureau, told The Associated Press in a Zoom interview from the rebel-held capital, Sanaa, that Washington reached out to the group after its rapid advance down Yemen's western coast to the Bab el-Mandeb Strait earlier this month. “We confirmed that we are not targeting the United States, or any other nation, in the strait, with the sole exception of the Saudi enemy,” he said. “That remains the case.” The remarks came after the Houthis fired a ballistic missile at the Saudi capital over the weekend.

The diplomacy around the conflict extended to Egypt. CIA Director John Ratcliffe met President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi there on Sunday, according to the president's office. It said el-Sissi backed a deal to resolve the Iranian crisis and ensure freedom of shipping navigation, and rejected any aggression against Arab countries. Last week el-Sissi hosted Saudi Arabia's crown prince, who was seeking support against attacks by the Iran-backed Houthis.

Qatar features in the wider Iran file. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi will stop briefly in Qatar on his way to the UN General Assembly in New York, the state-run IRNA news agency reported. Tehran says it is awaiting a US response to conditions it conveyed through Qatar for ending the war. Mohsen Rezaei, head of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, told Al Jazeera on Saturday that the conditions include ending the war on all fronts, releasing Iranian assets seized by the United States, and ending the US naval blockade of Iranian ports. Washington has granted visas to Araghchi and President Masoud Pezeshkian to attend the UN gathering despite the war.