Gulf States Invoke Joint Defence as Iran Holds Its Hormuz Terms
Gulf Cooperation Council foreign ministers, meeting in Manama, condemned Houthi attacks and invoked their joint defence agreement, under which an attack on one member concerns all six. Iran’s foreign minister said Tehran’s conditions for reopening the Strait of Hormuz remain in place. No new attack on shipping was reported on Sunday.
The weekly record of ten vessels attacked, and twenty-three this month, stands where it did this morning; what moved today was the Saudi-Yemen axis rather than the strait. The council also pressed for tighter enforcement of the United Nations arms embargo and urged states to designate the Houthis a terrorist organisation. The coalition says it brought down two drones early on Sunday, near Riyadh and in the Eastern Province, after an earlier interception near the capital. The effect on ordinary life in the Saudi capital is now visible: the Kingdom Centre, one of its landmark towers, has ordered mandatory remote working for office tenants indefinitely. Six people were injured in Najran by a Houthi projectile, with three homes and three vehicles damaged, according to the Saudi civil defence agency. Fighting inside Yemen has displaced more than 233,000 people. Yemen’s foreign minister rejected an Iranian offer to mediate, saying Iran was “offering to mediate a war ignited by the coup of the Houthi terrorist militia with their regime’s backing”. A claim that a Saudi airstrike in northern Yemen killed at least nine people comes from the Houthis’ own news agency and is not carried here as fact.