President Donald Trump announced that he has called off airstrikes on Yemen after hearing word from the Houthis that they would no longer attack ships.
‘They don’t want to fight anymore. They just don’t want to fight. And we will honor that, and we will stop the bombings,’ he said in the Oval Office during a meeting with the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney.
‘They have capitulated,’ Trump said of the rebel group.
He said he believed them when they said they’d no longer blow up ships in the Red Sea.
‘They will not be blowing up ships anymore, and that’s what the purpose of what we were doing. So that’s just news. We just found out about that. So I think that’s very, very positive they were. They were not a lot of ships going, as you know, sailing beautifully down the various seas,’ he said.
He declined to give more details, saying: ‘They’ve said ‘please don’t bomb us anymore and we’re not going to attack your ships.”
Trump said he had the information from a ‘very good source.’
President Donald Trump meets Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in the Oval Office
Trump also teased another big announcement coming in the next few days, ahead of his trip to the Middle East.
‘We’re gonna have a very, very big announcement to make, like, as big as it gets, and I won’t tell you on what, but it’s gonna and it’s very positive,’ he said.
‘It is really, really positive. And that announcement will be made either Thursday or Friday or Monday before we leave, but it will be one of the most important announcements that have been made in many years about a certain subject,’ he said.
He declined to say what the announcement would be about. He leaves for Saudi Arabia on Monday and the heads to the UAE and Qatar.
Trump has been involved in several negotiations, including on trade deals with countries around the world.
His announcement on the Houthis comes as the Israeli military carried out an airstrike on Yemen’s main airport in Sanaa on Tuesday, its second attack in two days on Iran-aligned Houthi rebels.
The Houthis have been firing at Israel and at shipping in the Red Sea since Israel began its military offensive against Hamas in Gaza after the Palestinian militant group’s deadly attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.
The Houthis say they are doing so in solidarity with the Palestinians and have pressed on with attacks in response to Israel expanding its military operations in the Gaza Strip.
Smoke billows over buildings following Israeli airstrikes in Sana’a, Yemen
It was Trump’s attack plans on the Houthis that led to the downfall of his former National Security Adviser Mike Waltz.
Waltz started a Signal group to discuss the attack plans and accidentally added The Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg.
Goldberg wrote about the chat for The Atlantic, claiming Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth included classified information on the unsecure app.
The White House denied any classified information was discussed.
Hegseth was later revealed to have used Signal to talk about the attacks with members of his family.
