Iran criticizes US silence on Israeli attack on Yemen

Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations criticized the United States for its silence on a recent Israeli strike on a port in Yemen controlled by a powerful militia that had earlier carried out a long-range strike on Tel Aviv in a letter shared with Newsweek.

The letter, attributed to Iran’s permanent representative to the UN, Amir Saied Iravani, and addressed to UN leaders, follows remarks earlier Tuesday by US Alternative Representative for Political Affairs Robert Wood, who criticized last Friday’s drone attack by Ansar Allah, also known as the Houthi movement, and accused Iran of supporting it at a UN Security Council meeting.

“The Houthi drone strike on July 19 in the heart of Tel Aviv, using what appears to be an Iranian-made Samad-3 drone, is just another instance of the Houthis flouting this Council’s demands to cease attacks and Iran violating the UN arms embargo,” Wood said at the meeting.

In response, Iravani said Tehran “firmly rejects” these “repeated and baseless allegations,” calling them “nothing more than a cynical attempt to divert international attention from the root causes of the current situation in the region and to protect Israel, allowing it to continue and justify its atrocities and malicious activities.”

“Despite such a desperate attempt,” he added, “the majority of the members of the Security Council rightly highlighted the root cause of the current situation in the region: the atrocities and barbaric massacres perpetrated by Israel against the innocent people of Gaza and called for an immediate end to the genocidal war against the people of Gaza.”

Iravani went on to call it “shameful and disappointing” that the United States, along with France and the United Kingdom, permanent members of the UN Security Council, “chose to remain silent” after Israel announced a retaliatory strike on the crucial port of Hodeidah in Yemen on Saturday.

Iran has repeatedly denied directly supplying Ansar Allah, which has a vast and sophisticated arsenal of weapons, including missiles and drones. These weapons have been used throughout the country’s nearly decade-long civil war, as well as, more recently, in the outbreak of conflict between Israel and the Palestinian movement Hamas since last October.

Nonetheless, the Islamic Republic has regularly praised the group for its actions and pledged to step up that support in response to growing regional tensions.

Israeli officials estimate that Ansar Allah has carried out about 200 attacks on their country more than 1,000 miles away in Yemen, where the group controls much of the northeast, including the capital and up to 80 percent of the country’s population. Most of the missiles and drones have reportedly been intercepted by Israeli air defenses, but at least one explosive drone managed to evade countermeasures last week.

The weapon resembled Iran’s Samad-3 but was hailed by Ansar Allah as a new platform known as the “Yafa.” The drone struck an apartment building near the U.S. Embassy in central Tel Aviv, killing one person and wounding 10 others, according to local authorities.

A senior Ansar Allah official had shared with Newsweek a warning to the United States and Israel hours earlier and later confirming the group’s involvement in the attack just before the public announcement.

Israeli officials quickly condemned the attack as an act of “terrorism” and said the drone had been detected by military radar but no action had been taken due to “human error.”

The following day, Israel claimed responsibility for a series of strikes on the port of Hodeidah in Yemen, causing a massive fire at an oil depot. Local media affiliated with Ansar Allah reported six dead and more than 80 injured as a result of the attack.

“The military target was the port of Hodeidah, used by the Houthis as a main supply route for the transfer of Iranian weapons from Iran to Yemen, as was the drone itself that was used in the attack on Friday morning,” Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari told reporters on Saturday.

“In the port area, the Israeli air force struck dual-use infrastructure used for terrorist activities, including energy infrastructure,” he added. “The necessary and proportionate Israeli strikes were carried out in order to put an end to the terrorist attacks by the Houthis.”

In light of the battle in Gaza as well as the attacks launched by Ansar Allah and other factions of the Iranian-aligned Axis of Resistance against Israel from abroad, Hagari asserted that “Israel is waging a multi-front war against Iran’s proxies of aggression.”

Although Hodeidah has long been identified by U.S. and Israeli officials as a suspected hub for Iranian arms shipments to Ansar Allah, the Hodeidah port has also served as a lifeline for essential goods and humanitarian aid entering Yemen, which remains in the grip of one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises due to famine, disease and poverty, even despite a lull in fighting since a U.N.-brokered ceasefire in April 2022.

In his letter on Tuesday, Iravani said Iran “condemns in the strongest terms the terrorist attacks and acts of aggression launched by the Israeli regime on July 20, 2024 at the port of Hodeida in Yemen, targeting civilians and critical infrastructure.”

“Such illegal actions, which constitute flagrant violations of Yemen’s national sovereignty and territorial integrity, the Charter of the United Nations and international law, in particular international humanitarian law, cannot be justified under the pretext of self-defense or Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations,” he said. “The Security Council must unequivocally condemn Israel for this heinous crime.”

The remarks came a day after Iran’s acting Foreign Minister Ali Bagheri Kani gave an exclusive interview to Newsweek Last week, regarding the operations of the Axis of Resistance against Israel, he praised “the initiative of the leaders and the resilient people of Yemen to accompany and support the Palestinians against the crimes of the Zionists” in a phone call with Mohammed Abdul Salam, chief negotiator of the Ansar Allah-led National Salvation Government in Yemen.

Ansar Allah leader Abdul-Malik al-Houthi vowed to exact “tremendous” revenge against Israel in response to the strikes on Hodeidah and the Israeli military reported that Israeli warplanes intercepted a surface-to-surface missile launched from Yemen on Sunday.