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Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

Genuine question: are the Houthis sufficiently organized to make a credible statement like this? It's clear that they have modern weapons, but relatively little reporting has clarified a reporting structure that would give any person doing international shipping the trust they would likely need to believe that kind of public statement.

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Empirically, no. The Houthi's do not have a good track record in this conflict of hitting only Israel affiliated ships.

There have been some accusations of Iran providing intelligence support. Iran probably does have the capabilities to do so. However Iran denies providing such support. And, even if they were trying to do so, they are empircally not doing that good of a job.

> Genuine question: are the Houthis sufficiently organized to make a credible statement like this?

I imagine nowadays you can check "list all ships that have itineraries leaving [an Israeli port] to [anywhere]" online, and knowing a ship identifier track its reported position and progress on a handy little map until it's in range for scouting and attack. (Unless the crew does some transponder malarkey.)

So I'd expect any "they didn't hit who they said they'd hit" controversy will involve disagreements over the "true" ownership or itinerary.

> I imagine nowadays you can check "did this ship recently depart an Israeli port" in a few minutes online, and then see its approximate position and progress on a map. (Unless the crew does some transponder malarkey.)

I tried this with the two ships in the article, and couldn't get a definitive answer. One of the ships hasn't had an online update since well over a month ago, when it was in SE Asia. Maybe there's a paid option that gives more detail or newer updates.

(But this doesn't answer the underlying question: is there a reason to believe that the Houthis have a command structure that is capable of stopping opportunistic attacks?)

> Maybe there's a paid option that gives more detail or newer updates.

Or one of the Houthi rebels has a cousin who works in the industry and can query a not-so-public/free database.

Either way, I'm saying it's not quite as tangled or secret as, say, banking privacy or corporate ownership structures, especially since big cargo ships are hard to hide when they come into any port.

Sure, I agree it’s information they can get. But the larger point was that “the Houthis have sufficient intelligence” is a moot statement if the Houthis don’t have a command structure that prevents random cells from attacking whoever they please. An adjacent thread pointed out that at least one unrelated Russian ship appears to have learnt this the hard way.

I'd recommend reading the Wiki on them. [1] They're not a terrorist organization in the sense that you're thinking. They were an opposition movement in Yemen. Yemen decided to crack down on them, this led to their opposition turning into an insurrection and sparking a civil war. The Houthis defeated not only the government of Yemen but also Saudi Arabia who joined the party. They now have stable control over a large part of Yemen, including all of its western land facing the Suez Canal.

They were designated a terrorist organization at the tail end of Trump's presidency, presumably to garner favor with Saudi Arabia. Biden then removed that designation as relations between Saudi Arabia and US deteriorated. He then put them back on it after they chose to intervene in the Israeli War. In this case it seems the designation is mostly political - not the sort you might associate with loosely clad terror cells that run around blowing random people up.

There have only been two US media reported incidents where they targeted an inappropriate ship, and the truth is not entirely clear in both cases, as both come down to there being a discrepancy or time lag between real ownership and the updating of the public naval sources. And in one of those two cases the ship was also not even damaged, but had some missiles fired over it, and was then followed briefly by several, presumably Houth-linked, small vessels. Presumably there was ongoing communication between the vessel and the Houthis in the interim.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houthi_movement

Their flag is literally the words:

>God is the Greatest >Death to America >Death to Israel >A Curse Upon the Jews >Victory to Islam

In Arabic.

We're literally watching them, frankly effectively indiscriminately because of the staggering levels of incompetence in targetting, attack civilian vessels in international waters and murder merchant mariners.

The Houthis should clearly be designated a terrorist organisation.

As I understand it, the problem is that when designated as terrorists, getting aid to Yemenis in Houthi-controlled areas is extremely difficult because you can't give it to the Houthis and you can't give it to them yourselves because of the Houthis.

So when the Houthis are correctly labelled, a lot of Yemenis die because the Houthis do not give a shit and so the Yemenis civilians starve to death without aid.

> I imagine

There isn’t much else to it there though, is it?

While they initially claimed that they were only targeting Israeli ships they quickly switched to attacking any ship crossing the strait regardless of flag, ownership, source or destination.

Probably if they 100% adhered to that, it would work the other way - proving there's someone who has enough oversight and control. I can't find easily if all the ships targeted so far matched the definition, but I'd be interested if anyone knows this.

Took me all of a minute to find:

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/houthis-mistakenly...

and at the time it was the second such incident.

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