A Houthi fighter mans a machine gun mounted on a truck during a parade for people who attended Houthi military training as part of a mobilization campaign, in Sanaa, Yemen, Dec. 18, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah

US President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday re-designating the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen as an official foreign terrorist organization (FTO).

“The Houthis’ activities threaten the security of American civilians and personnel in the Middle East, the safety of our closest regional partners, and the stability of global maritime trade,” the executive order read. 

The order also calls for the destruction of the Houthis’ military capabilities, thereby ending the group’s ability to attack American and allied targets, and for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and Secretary of State Marco Rubio to inspect all of their partners and programs in Yemen to ensure funds are not inadvertently handed over to the Houthis.

The directive also mandates USAID to cut relations with organizations that have helped fund Houthi operations or have combated international efforts to dismantle the terrorist group. In addition, the order directs Rubio to submit a report to the president after 30 days regarding the designation and “take all appropriate action” concerning the designation within another 15 days.

In January 2021, during the final days of the first Trump administration, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo designated the Houthis as an FTO. The next month, however, during the initial weeks of the Biden administration, then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken reversed the designation of the Houthis as an FTO, citing a desire to increase the flow of humanitarian aid into Yemen. 

The official FTO designation legally prohibits American individuals and organizations from lending “material support” to the Houthis, which some critics argue could worsen humanitarian conditions in Yemen. The Biden administration’s decision to de-list the Houthis as a terrorist group drew condemnation from Republicans in the US Congress

On Tuesday, US Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) introduced the “Standing Against Houthi Aggression Act” to reclassify the Houthis as an FTO, reversing official policies of the Biden administration. 

“Since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the Houthis have attacked US allies more than 100 times,” he said in a statement. “With the start of the Trump administration, it’s time to get serious about counterterrorism again and send a message to the Iranian regime that the US stands with Israel and will not tolerate our allies being attacked and shipping routes in the Middle East being disrupted. Designating the Houthis as an FTO will enable the Trump administration to bring the full weight of US sanctions in order to restore peace and order in the Middle East.”

Beyond banning individuals or organizations in the United States from giving “material support or resources” to the Houthis, placing the Yemeni rebels on the FTO list would also make non-citizen members and representatives of the Houthis eligible for deportation. The designation would further mandate any US financial institution with ties to the Houthis to alert the Office of Foreign Assets Control of the US Department of the Treasury.

Several countries — including Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, the United Arab Emirates, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and Israel — currently designate the Houthis as terrorists.

Trump’s executive order followed repeated attacks by the Houthis against Israel since October 2023, including the launch of over 200 missiles and 170 attack drones.

Last month, for example, a ballistic missile launched by the Iran-backed group struck a playground in Tel Aviv, injuring at least 16 people and causing damage to nearby homes.

The Houthis have been waging an insurgency in Yemen for two decades in a bid to overthrow the Yemeni government. They have controlled a significant portion of the country’s land in the north and along the Red Sea since 2014, when they captured it in the midst of a civil war.

The Yemeni terrorist group began disrupting global trade in a major way with their attacks on shipping in the busy Red Sea corridor after the Iran-backed Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel last Oct. 7, arguing their aggression was a show of support for Palestinians in Gaza.

The Houthi rebels — whose slogan is “death to America, death to Israel, curse the Jews, and victory to Islam” — have said they will target all ships heading to Israeli ports, even if they do not pass through the Red Sea.

Since Hamas’s Oct. 7 onslaught, which launched the ongoing war in Gaza, Houthi terrorists in Yemen have also routinely launched missiles toward Israel.

The US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) released a report in July revealing how Iran has been “smuggling weapons and weapons components to the Houthis.” The report noted that the Houthis used Iranian-supplied ballistic and cruise missiles to conduct over 100 land attacks on Israel, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and within Yemen, as well as dozens of attacks on merchant shipping.

While the Houthis have increasingly targeted Israeli soil in recent months, they have primarily attacked ships in the Red Sea, a key trade route, raising the cost of shipping and insurance. Shipping firms have been forced in many cases to re-route to longer and more expensive journeys around southern Africa to avoid passing near Yemen, having a major global economic impact.

Beyond Israeli targets, the Houthis have threatened and in some cases actually attacked US and British ships, leading the two Western allies to launch retaliatory strikes multiple times against Houthi targets in Yemen.

As a result of the Houthis’ aggression, the Biden administration in January 2024 placed the group on the Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT) list.

Though the SDGT designation allows for sanctions, it is considered less severe than placement on the FTO list. The Biden administration opted against reimposing the FTO designation on the Houthis, citing concerns over worsening the humanitarian crisis in Yemen.

“A foreign terrorist organization designation ran the risk of having a deterrent effect on some of those aid groups continuing to provide aid — worrying that they might be charged as providing material support to a terrorist organization,” former State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said at th tim.

Following the recently brokered ceasefire between Israel and Hamas to halt fighting in Gaza, the Houthis have announced they will limit their attacks on commercial vessels to Israel–linked ships provided the Gaza ceasefire is fully implemented.

The post Trump Re-Designates Iran-Backed Houthis in Yemen as Foreign Terrorist Organization first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

Orthodox Jewish men stand near a tank, ahead of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, as seen from the Israeli side of the border with Gaza, Jan. 16, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Amir Cohen

The New York Times news coverage of Israel and the Middle East is becoming increasingly unmoored from reality.

A recent Times article about a ceasefire in Gaza carries five bylines — Aaron Boxerman, Rawan Sheikh Ahmad, Johnatan Reiss, Ephrat Livni, and Adam Rasgon. A sixth reporter, Nick Cumming-Bruce, is credited at the end of the piece for having “contributed reporting from Geneva.” With so many people involved, accuracy and accountability is more difficult.

The Times article reports, “Aid workers also hope that the cease-fire would allow for far more medical evacuations. The WHO reported that Israel had approved the evacuation of 5,405 patients since the start of the war. But the pace of evacuations slowed to a trickle after Israel closed the Rafah crossing in May.”

Actually it was not “Israel” that “closed the Rafah crossing,” which is a passage between Gaza and Egypt. The Rafah crossing was closed by Egypt after the Israelis took over the other side. That threatened to end the smuggling that reportedly brought in huge bribe revenues to powerful people in Egypt.

Another Times article about the ceasefire — this one under Rasgon’s solo byline, though with reporting contributed by Boxerman and Jerusalem bureau chief Patrick Kingsley — is no more accurate. “When Hamas launched its Oct. 7, 2023, attack against Israel, it had hoped to ignite a regional war that would draw in its allies and lead to Israel’s destruction. Instead, it has been left to fight Israel almost entirely alone,” the Times writes. This conveniently skips over how Israel was attacked by Hezbollah, from Iran, and by some students and faculty on US and European university campuses. Prime Minister Netanyahu has described it as a “seven-front” war — not only Gaza, but also Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Iran, and Judea and Samaria (also known as the West Bank).

The Times does mention attacks on Israel from Yemen, but it describes them airily as “occasional rocket and drone attacks, most of which Israel has intercepted.” If the “occasional rocket and drone attacks” had targeted, say, the New York Times bureau in Washington, or Columbia Journalism School, one doubts that the Times would be so casually dismissive of them.

The Times article concludes:

For many civilians, a future with both Israel and Hamas in the picture is bleak.

“We’re talking about a people stuck between a state ready to act with total brutality and a group ready to provoke that state to act with brutality,” said Akram Atallah, a Palestinian columnist from Gaza.

That passage draws a strange equivalence between Israel and Hamas, an internationally designated terrorist group. What would the future look like without Israel in the picture? That would also be pretty bleak for the Jews who live there, who can expect to be treated with the same cruelty that Hamas treated its victims on Oct. 7, 2023.

Who is this Akram Atallah? In the past, according to Palestinian Media Watch, he’s likened Israel to Shakespeare’s caricature of Shylock. The Washington Post has reported that Atallah “was imprisoned with [former Hamas leader Ismail] Haniyeh in the early 1990s in Israel.”

This is the journalist the New York Times turns to for expert commentary?

For many civilian readers hoping for factual, reliable journalism about Israel and its neighbors, the present — with the New York Times distorting reality and indulging fantasies about wiping Israel off the map — is pretty bleak.

No one is asking the Times to be a spokesman for Netanyahu or his Likud Party. At least, that isn’t what I’m hoping for. I’d settle for just simple factual accuracy about issues such as who closed the Rafah crossing or which parties attacked Israel. Or, minimally, for the ability to draw a distinction between Israel and Hamas.

Ira Stoll was managing editor of The Forward and North American editor of The Jerusalem Post. His media critique, a regular Algemeiner feature, can be found here.

The post New York Times ‘Ceasefire’ Coverage Laments That Israel Will Exist first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

Israeli soldiers gesture from an Israeli military vehicle, after a ceasefire was agreed to by Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon, near Israel’s border with Lebanon in northern Israel, Nov. 27, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun

Israel said on Thursday the terms of a ceasefire with Hezbollah were not being implemented fast enough and there was more work to do, while the Iran-backed terrorist group urged pressure to ensure Israeli troops leave south Lebanon by Monday as set out in the deal.

The deal stipulates that Israeli troops withdraw from south Lebanon, Hezbollah remove fighters and weapons from the area, and Lebanese troops deploy there — all within a 60-day timeframe which will conclude on Monday at 4 am (0200 GMT).

The deal, brokered by the United States and France, ended more than a year of hostilities triggered by the Gaza war. Following the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s invasion of southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the opening salvo that started the Gaza conflict, Hezbollah began launching rockets, missiles, and drones at northern Israel almost daily in solidarity with Hamas, forcing tens of thousands of Israelis to evacuate their homes.

The fighting peaked with a major Israeli offensive that displaced more than 1.2 million people in Lebanon and left Hezbollah severely weakened.

“There have been positive movements where the Lebanese army and UNIFIL have taken the place of Hezbollah forces, as stipulated in the agreement,” Israeli government spokesmen David Mencer told reporters, referring to UN peacekeepers in Lebanon.

“We’ve also made clear that these movements have not been fast enough, and there is much more work to do,” he said, affirming that Israel wanted the agreement to continue.

Mencer did not directly respond to questions about whether Israel had requested an extension of the deal or say whether Israeli forces would remain in Lebanon after Monday’s deadline.

Hezbollah said in a statement that there had been leaks talking about Israel postponing its withdrawal beyond the 60-day period, and that any breach of the agreement would be unacceptable.

The statement said that possibility required everyone, especially Lebanese political powers, to pile pressure on the states which sponsored the deal to ensure “the implementation of the full [Israeli] withdrawal and the deployment of the Lebanese army to the last inch of Lebanese territory and the return of the people to their villages quickly.”

Any delay beyond the 60 days would mark a violation of the deal with which the Lebanese state would have to deal “through all means and methods guaranteed by international charters” to recover Lebanese land “from the occupation’s clutches,” Hezbollah said.

Israel said its campaign against Hezbollah aimed to secure the return home of tens of thousands of people forced to leave their homes in northern Israel by Hezbollah rocket fire.

It inflicted major blows on Hezbollah during the conflict, killing its leader Hassan Nasrallah and thousands of the group’s fighters and destroying much of its arsenal.

The group was further weakened in December when its Syrian ally, Bashar al-Assad, was toppled, cutting its overland supply route from Iran.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Thursday, said Israel had put an end to hostilities and was removing its forces from Lebanon, and that the Lebanese army had gone to locations of Hezbollah ammunition stores and destroyed them.

He also indicated there was more to do to shore up the ceasefire. “Are we done? No. We will need more time to achieve results,” he said.

Three diplomats said on Thursday it looked like Israeli forces would still be in some parts of southern Lebanon after the 60-day mark.

A senior Lebanese political source said President Joseph Aoun had been in contact with US and French officials to urge Israel to complete the withdrawal within the stipulated timeframe.

The Lebanese government has told US mediators that Israel‘s failure to withdraw on time could complicate the Lebanese army’s deployment, and this would be a blow to diplomatic efforts and the optimistic atmosphere in Lebanon since Aoun was elected president on Jan. 9.

The post Israel Sees More to Do on Lebanon Ceasefire as Deadline Nears first appeared on Algemeiner.com.