Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd, two of the world’s leading shipping companies, announced on Friday the suspension of their ships’ transit in the Red Sea after a series of attacks by Yemen’s Houthi rebels on commercial vessels in the Bab el Mandeb Strait, France agencies reported. Presse, Reuters and Agerpres.

This strait, located between the Arabian Peninsula and Africa, is particularly important for maritime transport, with about 40% of world trade transiting through it.

Houthi rebels, who are close to Iran and control Yemen’s west coast, have threatened that any ship in the area bound for Israel could be targeted in retaliation for the Israeli army’s offensive against the Hamas group in the Gaza Strip.

Several commercial vessels have been attacked in this way by drones or missiles in recent weeks, but there were at least three such attacks in one day on Friday in the Bab el Mandeb Strait. According to the marine traffic monitoring portal Marine Tracker, the first two container ships that were attacked were not heading to an Israeli port, but to the Saudi port of Jeddah.

As such, a Maersk ship was the target of an attack on Thursday and another on Friday, so the Danish company announced on Friday night that it had ordered all its ships in the area to suspend traffic until further notice. The shipping company assured that it will do everything possible to ensure that supply chains are affected as little as possible.

And the German company Hapag-Lloyd, which owns a ship that was damaged in one of the attacks on Friday without loss of crew, has decided to suspend the navigation of its cargo through the Red Sea until December 18, and will decide later. later, how it will operate after that date.