India braced for more energy prices shocks with crude prices already spiking as exactly two months into the Iran conflict, the Tehran-backed Houthi rebels signalled their entry into the raging war by firing a barrage of missiles at Israel on Saturday.
Reports said missiles were fired by Houthis—who control Yemen’s capital Sana’a and a substantial swath of northern Yemen—at military targets in southern Israel.
Media reports quoted Houthi military spokesperson Yahya Saree as saying that the attack on Israel had met its military objectives while the Israeli military said it had detected a missile launch from Yemen and that the missile was intercepted before reaching Eilat, a city in south Israel.
The implication of this development is immense because active Houthi involvement means the very critical Bab-el-Mandeb strait, a major global chokepoint between Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula and Djibouti and Eritrea in the Horn of Africa, would come under the Houthi, and by extension, Iranian control. The Strait connects the Red Sea to the Arabian Sea and then to the Indian Ocean.
Bab-el-Mandeb strait is the key route that connects the oil-rich Gulf countries with the markets of Europe and Asia. After the closure of the Hormuz strait, it was the only open route to the global markets.
Besides adding huge volatility to the galloping oil prices which will hit Indian interests very hard, the narrow strait is also the key route for the undersea submarine cables that connect India and East Asia to other geographies.
In both cases, the Indian economy will be hit very hard as will be most economies that import most of their energy needs and that are connected to the global communication network with the undersea cables passing through Bab-el-Mandeb.
In 2023-24 too, the Houthis had deployed missiles and drones to exert control over the maritime traffic through the crucial strait thereby impacting global trade.
Known to be an Iranian proxy, the Houthis had refrained from directly joining the war till now with analysts conjecturing that Iran had been saving the involvement deployment of Houthis as a strategy. It is also a signal that the Houthi entry into the war implies the entry of other Iran proxies like the Hezbollah and the Iraqi militia into the conflict thereby substantially widening the geography and scope of the raging conflict.
