Talks on prisoner swap between the Houthis and the Yemeni government have been indefinitely postponed, a Yemeni government official said on Wednesday. Majid Fadael, spokesperson and negotiator for the government's prisoners, said on X that the planned talks in Jordan this week have been indefinitely deferred. He indicated that the talks were postponed due to the "intransigence" of the Houthis and their obstruction of the meeting. There has been no statement from the Houthis on the decision to postpone the talks. The U.N. has been leading peace efforts to end the war in Yemen. The parties to the conflict have agreed to halt the fighting. However, no agreement on prisoner swap and other political and economic issues has been reached. The war in Yemen began in 2015 when the Houthis toppled the UN-recognized government.
On Wednesday, U.S. media reported on a meeting at the White House of U.S. President Biden's national security team to consider a powerful military response to Yemen's Houthi attacks on shipping lanes in the Red Sea. The meeting discussed possible options, including strikes against Houthi targets in Yemen, according to two U.S. administration officials. This came as the Houthis vowed to take revenge against the U.S. forces that killed ten Houthi fighters on December 31. Houthi officials said they will target the U.S. and will make American battleships, American interests targets of Houthi drones. The Houthi group repeatedly said attacks on ships will stop when Israel ends its war on Gaza.
The French shipping company CMA CGM said one of its container ships in the Red Sea was unharmed after Yemen's Houthis claimed on Wednesday to have targeted it. A spokesperson for the French shipping company told the Reuters news agency that the ship was unharmed and there had been "no incident" and said the vessel was headed to Egypt and not Israel. The Houthis' military spokesperson Yahya Sarea said Wednesday that the group had "targeted" the CMA CGM Tage container ship. Sarea said the Houthis would continue attacks until aid enters Gaza.
Iran blamed Israel and the United States on Wednesday for twin bomb blasts that killed at least 95 people in the country's south, ripping through a crowd commemorating Revolutionary Guards general Qasem Soleimani four years after his death in a U.S. strike. "Make no mistake. The responsibility for this crime lies with the U.S. and Zionist regimes (Israel) and terrorism is just a tool," the Iranian president's political deputy, Mohammad Jamshidi, wrote on X. The two explosions came amid high Middle East tensions over the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza and the killing of a Hamas senior leader in Lebanon on Tuesday.
