Abdulmalik al-Houthi claims US strikes on Yemen have improved his army in hour-long address on Arabic media channels
The leader of Yemen’s Houthi movement has urged the Arab world to mount mass boycotts of Israeli goods as he claimed US and UK missile attacks launched on his country were a sign of the impact of the Houthis’ attacks on Israeli-linked commercial shipping in the Red Sea.
In an hour-long address carried on Arabic media channels and suffused with religious rhetoric, Abdulmalik al-Houthi said it was “a great honour and blessing to be confronting America directly”.
Overnight the US military fired another wave of missile strikes against Houthi-controlled sites, marking the fourth time in a week that it has directly targeted the group in Yemen.
The strikes were launched from the Red Sea, hitting more than a dozen sites, officials told the AP news agency, and came after a drone launched from areas controlled by the Houthis hit a US-owned vessel in the Gulf of Aden.
In his speech on Thursday, al-Houthi claimed the only impact of the recent missile strikes had been to improve his army and navy’s technology, and he ridiculed Joe Biden “as an elderly man that has trouble climbing the stairs of an aeroplane yet is travelling 9,000 miles to attack those that wanted to stand by the oppressed people of Gaza”.
He asked why those that oppressed Gaza felt they had the right to label others as terrorists for fulfilling their religious duty to come to the help of Palestinians, a reference to Washington’s decision on Wednesday to give notice it intends formally redesignate the Houthis as a terrorist group.
And he said the Houthis had been singled out because they were prepared to take practical steps to support the Palestinians whereas the general position of the leaders of many Arab and Islamic countries remained lukewarm and weak.
