WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he’s ordering a halt to nearly two months of US airstrikes on Yemen’s Houthis, saying the Iran-backed rebels have indicated that “they don’t want to fight anymore” and have pledged to stop attacking ships along a vital global trade route. “We’re going to stop the bombing of the Houthis, effective immediately,” Trump said at the start of his Oval Office meeting with Canadian prime minister Mark Carney. Trump said the Houthis had indicated to US officials that “they don’t want to fight anymore. They just don’t want to fight. And we will honor that, and we will stop the bombings.” That likely means an abrupt end to a campaign of airstrikes that began in March, when Trump promised to use “overwhelming lethal force” after the Houthis said they would resume attacks on Israeli vessels sailing off Yemen in response to Israel’s mounting another blockade on the Gaza Strip. At the time, they described the warning as affecting the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, the Bab el-Mandeb Strait and the Arabian Sea. Trump’s announcement came the same day that Israel’s military launched airstrikes against the Houthis that it said fully disabled the international airport in the Yemeni capital, Sanaa. Israel’s attacks were its second round of airstrikes on targets in Yemen in retaliation for a Houthi missile strike Sunday on Israel’s international airport. A US official said the administration had not notified Israel of the agreement with the Houthis before Trump’s announcement. Israel, according to this official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private diplomatic talks, was irked by the unexpected news, particularly because the Houthis have continued to launch attacks on Israel proper and other Israeli targets. Israel does not appear to be covered by the US-Houthi agreement. Trump said the Houthis had “capitulated but, more importantly, we will take their word that they say they will not be blowing up ships anymore. And that’s what the purpose of what we were doing,” Trump said. “I think that’s very positive,” Trump added. “They were knocking out a lot of ships.” Asked how the Houthis had communicated that they were looking to stop being targeted by US bombs, Trump offered few details, saying only with a chuckle that the information came from a “very good source.” A short time later, Omani foreign minister Badr al-Busaidi, confirmed that the US bombing campaign was ending, posting on X that discussions involving the US and Oman, as well as negotiators in Yemen, “have resulted in a ceasefire agreement between the two sides.” “In the future, neither side will target the other, including American vessels, in the Red Sea and Bab al-Mandab Strait, ensuring freedom of navigation and the smooth flow of international commercial shipping,” he wrote, calling the agreement a “welcome outcome.” Defense secretary Pete Hegseth said on social media that Trump’s “objective from Day One: ‘ensuring freedom of navigation.’ PEACE THRU STRENGTH in action.” Despite Trump’s framing of the deal as a way to reopen the Red Sea to commercial shipping without fear of Houthi attack, “the Houthis have not fired on a commercial ship since December,” Gregory Brew, a senior analyst with the Eurasia Group risk-analysis firm, said on X. “They are likely, however, to continue shooting at Israel,” Brew noted. The Houthis had been waging persistent missile and drone attacks against commercial and military ships in the region in what the group’s leadership has described as an effort to end Israel’s war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. From November 2023 until January 2025, the Houthis targeted more than 100 merchant vessels with missiles and drones, sinking two of them and killing four sailors. That has greatly reduced the flow of trade through the Red Sea corridor, which typically sees $1 trillion of goods move through it annually. The Houthis paused attacks in a self-imposed ceasefire until the US launched a broad assault against the rebels in mid-March. Those strikes Trump had ordered were similar to ones carried out against the Houthis multiple times by the administration of his predecessor, democratic president Joe Biden. The Trump-ordered airstrikes gained a higher profile in the public consciousness when The Atlantic revealed that Hegseth had texted sensitive plans for a military strike against the Houthis on a group chat in the messaging app Signal that mistakenly included the magazine’s editor-in-chief. Trump stood by Hegseth and downplayed the breach as a “glitch.” But national security adviser Mike Waltz, who created the group chat on Signal, left his post last week and has been nominated by Trump to be the US ambassador to the United Nations.
