Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations has criticized the United States over its silence on a recent Israeli strike against a port in Yemen held by a powerful militia that earlier conducted a long-range strike on Tel Aviv in a letter shared with Newsweek.
The letter, attributed to Iranian Permanent Representative to the U.N. Amir Saied Iravani and addressed to U.N. leadership, came in response to remarks made earlier Tuesday by U.S. alternative representative for political affairs Robert Wood, who slammed the drone attack conducted last Friday by Ansar Allah, also known as the Houthi movement, and accused Iran of backing it at a U.N. Security Council meeting.
“The Houthis’ July 19 drone strike in the heart of Tel Aviv using what appears to be an Iranian-made Samad-3 UAV is just another case of the Houthis flouting the demands of this Council to cease attacks and Iran violating the UN arms embargo,” Wood said at the meeting.
In response, Iravani said Tehran “strongly rejects” such “repeated and baseless allegations,” calling them “nothing more than a cynical attempt to divert international attention away from the root causes of the current situation in the region and to shield Israel, allowing it to continue and justify its atrocities and malevolent activities.”
“Despite such a desperate attempt,” he added, “the majority of the Security Council members rightly highlighted the root cause of the current situation in the region: Israel’s ongoing atrocities and barbaric massacres against the innocent people of Gaza and calling for an immediate end to the genocidal war against the people of Gaza.”
Iravani then called it “shameful and disappointing” that the U.S., along with fellow permanent U.N. Security Council members France and the United Kingdom “have chosen to remain silent” after Israel announced a retaliatory strike on Yemen’s crucial port of Hodeidah on Saturday.
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Iran has repeatedly denied directly supplying Ansar Allah, which has amassed a large and sophisticated arsenal of weapons, including missile and drones. These weapons have been used both throughout the civil war that has rocked the nation for nearly a decade as well as, more recently, the outbreak of the conflict raging between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas movement since last October.
Still, the Islamic Republic has regularly praised the group for its actions and has vowed to bolster this support in response to growing regional tensions.
Israeli officials have estimated that Ansar Allah has conducted around 200 attacks against their nation from more than a thousand miles away in Yemen, where the group is in control of much of the northeast, including the capital and up to 80 percent of the national population. Most missiles and drones have been reportedly intercepted by Israeli air defenses, but at least one explosive unmanned aerial vehicle managed to evade countermeasures las week.
The weapon bore similarities to the Iranian Samad-3 but was hailed by Ansar Allah as a new platform known as “Yafa.” The drone struck an apartment building near the U.S. embassy branch office in central Tel Aviv, killing one person and injuring 10 others, according to local authorities.
A senior Ansar Allah official had shared with Newsweek a warning to both the U.S. and Israel only hours earlier and later confirmed the group’s involvement in the attack just before the public announcement.
Israeli officials swiftly condemned the attack as an act of “terrorism” and stated that the drone had been detected by military radar, but no action was taken due to “human error.”
The following day, Israel claimed responsibility for a series of strikes against Yemen’s Hodeidah port, causing a massive inferno at an oil depot. Local media affiliated with Ansar Allah counted six killed and more than 80 wounded as a result of the attack.
“The military target was the Hodeidah port, used by the Houthis as the main supply route for the transfer of Iranian weapons from Iran to Yemen, like the UAV itself that was used in the attack on Friday morning,” Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari told reporters Saturday.
“In the area of the port, the Israeli Air Force struck dual-use infrastructure used for terrorist activities, including energy infrastructure,” he added. “Israel’s necessary and proportionate strikes were carried out in order to stop the Houthi’s terror attacks.”
In light of the battle in Gaza as well as attacks launched by Ansar Allah and other factions of the Iran-aligned Axis of Resistance against Israel from abroad, Hagari asserted that “Israel is fighting a multi-front war against Iran’s aggression proxies.”
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Though Hodeidah has long been identified by U.S. and Israeli officials as an alleged hub for Iranian weapon supplies to Ansar Allah, the port Hodeidah has also served as a lifeline for crucial goods and humanitarian assistance entering Yemen, which remains plagued by 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 Tuesday, Iravani said that Iran “condemns in the strongest possible terms the terrorist attacks and acts of aggression launched by the Israeli regime on 20 July 2024 at Hodeida port in Yemen targeting civilians and critical infrastructure.”
“Such illegal actions, which constitute egregious violations of national sovereignty and territorial integrity of Yemen, the United Nations Charter and international law, particularly international humanitarian law, cannot be justified under the pretext of self-defense or Article 51 of the UN Charter,” he said. “The Security Council must condemn unequivocally Israel for this heinous crime.”
The remarks came a day after acting Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Bagheri Kani, who offered an exclusive interview with Newsweek last week regarding the Axis of Resistance operations against Israel, praised “the initiative of the leadership and the resilient people of Yemen in accompanying and supporting 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 has vowed to exact a “huge” revenge against Israel in response to the strikes at Hodeida and the IDF reported that Israeli fighter jets intercepted a surface-to-surface missile launched from Yemen on Sunday.
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