Saudi Arabia prepares military operations as Houthis resume strikes on territory

Saudi Arabia prepares military operations as Houthis resume strikes on territory, shipping

GIORGIA VALENTE/THE MEDIA LINE

Reports that Saudi Arabia may be preparing a military operation against Yemen’s Houthis have revived fears that Riyadh could be drawn back into a direct ground war. But the evidence currently points to contingency planning and force repositioning - not a confirmed Saudi ground invasion. 

Public reporting has described Saudi troop movements in eastern Yemen, discussions over a possible operation in or towards the central governorate of Al-Bayda, and efforts to assemble a multinational maritime coalition.

Saudi Arabia, however, has not publicly announced a ground offensive, and the reported movements do not by themselves establish that a final political or operational order has been issued.

The speculation follows the collapse of the relative calm that had prevailed along the Saudi-Yemeni border. On July 13, the Houthis fired missiles towards southern Saudi Arabia after accusing Riyadh of striking Sanaa airport, ending approximately four years without comparable cross-border exchanges.

On July 20, the Houthis announced a maritime blockade against Saudi Arabia, and days later claimed attacks against Saudi oil tankers and energy infrastructure. 

The pressure is particularly sensitive because the Red Sea has become increasingly important for Saudi energy exports as the war between the United States and Iran continues to disrupt traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.

The Houthis’ ability to threaten shipping around Bab el-Mandeb therefore exposes Saudi Arabia to pressure at both ends of the Arabian Peninsula. Saudi officials have responded with airstrikes against Houthi targets and the establishment of a 14-nation maritime defense coalition involving countries including Egypt, Pakistan, Jordan, Bahrain, Yemen and Turkey. 

Yet a new Saudi campaign would not necessarily resemble the intervention launched in 2015.

Cyril Widdershoven, a senior advisor at Blue Water Strategy, told The Media Line that as of Aug. 2, 2026, there was no conclusive evidence that Saudi regular forces had already entered Houthi-controlled Yemen in significant numbers or begun a major ground invasion.

He said that the increasingly credible indicators of Riyadh's preparation of military options could include possibly a limited land campaign, which most probably would be led by Yemeni anti-Houthi forces with Saudi air, intelligence, logistics, and command support.

The central distinction is between a Saudi invasion and an offensive conducted by Yemeni forces with Saudi support. Analysts say Riyadh appears to have little appetite for sending large, armored formations deep into northern Yemen, where the geography, extended supply lines and the Houthis’ experience in irregular warfare would expose Saudi forces to significant losses.

Instead, any operation might rely on units aligned with Yemen’s internationally recognized Presidential Leadership Council, particularly forces positioned around Marib, Hadramaut and the Saudi border. Saudi Arabia could contribute air power, intelligence, artillery, engineering capabilities, air defense, logistics and command assistance.

“It will not be a Saudi invasion resembling the 2015 intervention,” Widdershoven said. “Most plausibly it would be a Saudi-enabled Yemeni offensive, possibly supported by small numbers of Saudi personnel in command, intelligence, artillery, air-defense, engineering, and special-forces roles.”

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Iran Denies Negotiations With US After Trump Announces Talks For Monday Afternoon

Iran Denies Negotiations With US After Trump Announces Talks For Monday Afternoon

TYLER DURDEN

President Trump now says new talks with Iran will begin Monday afternoon after he called off a planned "massive attack" - following high level Saudi intervention, and also likely White House advisors and Pentagon leadership failing to agree on a strategic vision.

"The Saudis expressed concern and asked for clarity about the plan of action," one US official told Axios over the weekend, with another saying that crown prince Mohammed bin Salman urged Trump to de-escalate and refrain from launching the strikes. Trump aknowledged all of this to reporters aboard Air Force One while returning from Bedminster, New Jersey, to Joint Base Andrews. He claimed the canceled attack would have been "the biggest attack since World War II" and could have been "disastrous" for Iran.

"I was asked to by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, by Qatar, and by Iran to hold off strikes," Trump said. "It would have been a massive attack." He added: "When the allies asked to call it off, you gotta say, Well, let's see."

"I asked the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, 'What would you rather have us do?'" Trump said. "He said, 'We would prefer a deal rather than an attack.'" And more: "Allies think there is a deal," Trump explained. "There is a deal on Hormuz, and it will be a deal on the nuclear."

Iranian officials said there are currently no negotiations with the United States and that Tehran is not planning to send or host any delegations "these days."

However, Iran has confirmed that it is deep into negotiations over managing the Strait of Hormuz with Oman, and that it desires to get more ships moving through the vital transit waterway. According to Bloomberg on Monday:

Iran suggested negotiations to get more ships moving through the Strait of Hormuz are making progress, after President Donald Trump called off what he said was a major attack on the Islamic Republic.

Oil fell on Monday, with Brent crude down about 4.5% to just over $83 a barrel, after Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said discussions between Tehran and Oman over management of the strait are in the final stages.

While Tehran officials acknowledged that negotiations with Oman are ongoing and that progress has been made toward securing a temporary passage through the Strait of Hormuz, they stressedthat reaching an agreement with Oman alone would not be enough to reopen the waterway, warning that the situation will remain unchanged as long as US "aggression" continues.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei conveyed also that China is concerned about "the escalation of conflict and insecurity in the region" and is working to prevent the situation from worsening. He described that there is no new mediator involved in contacts with Washington, with Pakistan and Qatar continuing to carry out that role.

On the broader conflict, Baghaei argued that the US-Israeli war on Iran is not merely a war against one country, but "a war against the entire region." He laid out that Iran once again rejected attempts to tie developments in Yemen to the conflict with Iran, calling such claims "a form of evasion of responsibility."

"We currently do not have negotiations with America," and Iran had no plans to host foreign delegations or send negotiators abroad in the coming days, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei told reporters.

Meanwhile, the on-again, off-again style of escalation and de-escalation pattern we are witnessing is likely only helping Tehran's side in terms of leverage, as the conflict grinds on and potentially becomes more politically costly for the White House. 

Referring to the Iranians, Reuters writes in new analysis, "They see an opportunity in what they regard as President Donald Trump's reluctance to become deeply entangled ​in another Middle East conflict ahead of November's midterm elections."

"The Iranians...believe that by widening the war and increasing the pressure, he will eventually give in," a Gulf source is cited in the report as saying. "Trump thinks he can hit the Iranians hard and bring them to the negotiating table, but they won't bend." That much should be obvious by now, as Trump Tacos once again.

According to more from Reuters: "Iran is betting it can outlast Washington by turning the Middle East's trade routes, shipping lanes and energy infrastructure into pressure points that steadily raise the cost of confrontation, according to Gulf officials and analysts."

Who can outlast? This is currently month #6 of the war...

"Rather than seeking a ​decisive military victory, Tehran is pursuing a strategy of calibrated escalation aimed at widening the conflict without triggering full-scale war," the report continues. But that much should have been obvious and anticipated from week one of the war, and clearly the US side underestimated things.

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Trump Says "Perimeters Of A Deal Reached" With Iran To Reopen Hormuz After Call With Saudi Crown Prince

The past few days have been tense. Although no US strikes were launched from Friday night into Saturday morning and the Gulf region remained quiet early Sunday, anticipation surrounding President Trump's next move is keeping energy traders and Gulf governments on edge. The big concern is that another round of strikes could trigger a wider regional conflict, particularly as the Iranian-backed Houthis have reactivated offensive operations in the southern Red Sea in recent weeks.

The Trump administration and Department of War may pursue de-escalation from here after Trump wrote on Truth Social late Saturday night: "We have just been asked by Iran, and other Middle Eastern Countries, to hold off any attack in that the perimeters of a deal has been agreed to."

That de-esclation pathway was followed by a new signal early Sudnay from Saudi Press Agency, Saudi Arabia's official state news agency, stating that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman held a call with President Trump, discussing the "necessity of prioritizing dialogue to de-escalate tensions and the importance of exerting all possible efforts to achieve a truce that paves the way for diplomatic solutions that yield positive results for preserving the security and stability of the region and prevent it from being drawn into a wider conflict whose repercussions would affect regional and international security and stability."

The MbS-Trump call was first reported by Axios, which got the scoop on Saturday evening:

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman spoke to President Trump on Saturday and expressed concern over his plans for massive new strikes against Iran, according to two U.S. officials and a third source with knowledge of the call.

Such an attack could lead to an unprecedented escalation in the five-month war, which has repeatedly paused as Trump opened the door to negotiations — only to resume when those diplomatic efforts failed.

Iran has threatened to retaliate by launching attacks against energy and infrastructure facilities in Israel and the Gulf countries

• The Saudis expressed concern and asked for clarity about the plan of action," one U.S. official told Axios.
• A second source with knowledge of the call said MBS urged Trump to de-escalate and refrain from launching the strikes.

Why the MBS-Trump conversation matters is that Saudi Arabia remains one of Washington's top Gulf region allies. Riyadh has heavily influenced Trump's Iran policy at previous inflection points and appears to have exerted similar influence in delaying or narrowing the next phase of US military action.

Canada Is Building Authoritarianism

Canada Is Building Authoritarianism on Purpose — One ‘Human Rights’ Bill at a Time

Vlad Tepes

Canada is not sleepwalking into authoritarianism – it is deliberately constructing a surveillance-and-censorship regime, one “safety” and “human rights” bill at a time, while its tribunals already crush individual liberty in the name of ideology.

Canada is not fumbling into authoritarianism as in Hanlon’s Razor. It is building it, one bill at a time, deliberately using the language of safety and the machinery of “human rights” to do it.

In an exclusive interview with RAIR Foundation USA on July 28th, John Carpay, founder and president of the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF), walked through the current slate of federal bills (C-34, C-22, C-9, C-8, C-11, C-18) that together build the plumbing of a surveillance and censorship state. But the more important thing Carpay’s interview reveals, once you connect it to the cases his own organization has fought for over a decade, is that the machinery isn’t coming. It’s already running.

Carpay founded the JCCF, a donor-funded, non-profit legal charity that takes no government money and fields a team of roughly ten lawyers across Canada. Its mandate: defend Canadians, pro bono, when their freedoms of expression, association, religion, conscience, peaceful assembly, mobility, or bodily autonomy are threatened by government or by tribunals acting as government proxies.

That mandate has put the JCCF in the middle of nearly every major Canadian civil liberties fight of the last five years. A partial list of people and cases the organization has represented or funded:

• Barry Neufeld, former Chilliwack, BC school trustee, fined $750,000 by the BC Human Rights Tribunal for saying there are only two sexes
• Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, Freedom Convoy organizers, defended against mischief charges and a Crown appeal seeking harsher sentences
• Dr. Eric Payne, an Alberta physician prosecuted by the College of Physicians and Surgeons for a heavily footnoted letter questioning COVID vaccine policy that nobody in government or medicine could actually refute
• Jeff Evely, Canadian Armed Forces veteran, in a landmark case over compelled speech and gender ideology in Nova Scotia
• Multiple BC home aestheticians, women (several from conservative Middle Eastern and South Asian backgrounds) sued before the BC Human Rights Tribunal by trans-identified male activist Jonathan Yaniv for refusing to wax his genitals
• An unnamed Alberta woman prosecuted under human rights legislation for objecting to a rainbow-painted crosswalk as a political symbol on public property
• A woman prosecuted for saying a “family friendly drag show” is a contradiction in terms
• Six prominent Canadians facing human rights complaints in BC for allegedly misgendering Yaniv
• The Canadian Association for Sex-Based Rights, defending women’s right to sex-segregated spaces, including a case opposing the transfer of male inmates into women’s federal prisons

This is the record Carpay brought to the interview. It’s also the reason his warnings about pending legislation carry weight that a think-tank press release wouldn’t.

Human rights, as originally conceived, protect the individual: the right to speak, to own property, to worship, to refuse medical treatments. What Carpay’s caseload shows, case after case, is that Canada’s human rights commissions and tribunals have been repurposed to do the opposite. They now adjudicate collective claims, decide which group is the officially designated victim class at any given moment, and use that designation to override the individual rights of whoever stands in the way of that group’s grievances.

Carpay didn’t dance around the root cause. Asked why police stood by while protesters tore down a statue of Queen Victoria in Winnipeg but ticket ordinary citizens for blocking a single traffic lane, he named it directly: a neo-Marxist framework that sorts people into oppressor and oppressed categories by group identity, then police accordingly.

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‘We Are Spanish, We Are Locked in Our Homes’

‘We Are Spanish, We Are Locked in Our Homes’ — Ceuta 2026: The Manufactured Invasion (Video)

Vlad Tepes

A Spanish government that deliberately dismantled its last border deterrent, knowing the predictable result, enabled a manufactured 60,000-strong Moroccan invasion of Ceuta that locked its own citizens in their homes amid looting and violence—the latest act in a 1,300-year pattern of conquest by settlement.

In the last week of July 2026, roughly 60,000 people crossed from Morocco into the Spanish city of Ceuta in under 48 hours. At least 67 died trying. A woman filmed inside her own home, unable to leave, gave the plainest account of what that actually looks like on the ground. 

What she describes is not a humanitarian emergency that arrived by accident. It is the latest chapter of a pattern with a 1,300-year history, enabled by a government that had every reason to know what would happen.

The footage, shared by Tommy Robinson and circulating widely on X, shows a Ceuta resident speaking directly to camera, trapped inside her house as the crisis unfolds around her.

“They have invaded us,” she says. “We are locked in our homes. Supermarkets are looted. There is absolutely nothing. I don’t know when we will start to be hungry because we are emptying our fridges.”

She describes her sister forced to climb out through a window because men were breaking into the house next door “screaming.” She describes 70,000 people in a city of that size, telling her there is nothing to fear, while she cannot leave her own street. “This is a real madness. There is no one to protect us. They have abandoned us. We are Spanish. We have our business, our lives. We are hardworking people, like any Spanish. We need help.”

She is careful, more careful than many commentators have been on her behalf, to note that children among the arrivals deserve compassion. But she will not let that override what she is actually watching happen outside her window: “There are many bad people. 70,000 people… how many people can sneak (in who are) good and how many people can sneak (in who are) bad.” Her closing line carries the whole indictment in five words: “Shame on the government. Shame on politicians.”

This is not rhetoric. It is corroborated, point for point, by the wire services. Spain’s Interior Ministry confirmed close to 50,000 migrants entered Ceuta in a single 24-hour stretch, with the total climbing toward 60,000 within days. 

Reuters and the Associated Press reported looting, mass property invasion, and Spain deploying military units to reinforce the Guardia Civil. Ceuta’s own president, Juan Jesús Vivas, called it “a situation of absolute humanitarian and social emergency,” comparing the scale to “a million people entering Spain irregularly” if projected onto the mainland’s population.

Unlike the 2021 Ceuta crisis, which involved mostly minors and sub-Saharan migrants, this wave was overwhelmingly adult, male, and Moroccan. Riccardo Fabiani, North Africa director for the International Crisis Group, did not hedge: “I think that after almost 48 hours since the beginning of the crisis in Ceuta, we can safely say that this was a manufactured crisis.” He cited video of trucks unloading people directly in front of passive Moroccan police.

The second question is what Madrid’s government did to make this outcome not just possible, but likely.

On July 8, 2026, Spain’s Supreme Court ruled that migrants intercepted swimming into Ceuta or Melilla could no longer be summarily returned without due process, ending the “hot returns” practice that had functioned as the enclaves’ last real deterrent. 

Spanish broadcaster RTVE reported that news of the ruling spread rapidly across Moroccan social media in the days that followed, and is credited by multiple outlets with helping trigger the very crossings that followed. This is not disputed by anyone reporting on the crisis; it is the mainstream explanation offered by NPR, the BBC, and Time.

Layer onto that Pedro Sánchez’s government’s regularization program, which has offered a path to legal status for over 500,000 undocumented migrants already in Spain, with more than a million applications received. 

Spain’s border is porous and its consequences for crossing it, negligible to non-existent. In actuality, the Spanish government makes sure this behavior is rewarded.

The explanation now spreading across social media is that this is simple vote-buying, Sánchez “importing voters” to secure permanent socialist majorities. It is a comfortable story. It assumes migrants become loyal, grateful clients of the existing political system, and it lets people who oppose Sánchez feel they understand the game without confronting what is actually happening underneath it.

In 1966, Marxist theorists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven published “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty” in The Nation. Their strategy was not to win elections. It was to deliberately overload a system, in their case, the welfare rolls, past its administrative and fiscal capacity, forcing a crisis that would compel the wholesale restructuring of the political order. Crisis, not incompetence, was the mechanism.

Whether or not anyone in Madrid has read Cloward and Piven, the logic being executed against Ceuta’s Spanish residents is theirs. The purpose of a policy that can be obviously known to produce a specific destructive result, and is enacted anyway, is that result. 

The purpose of these state policies, stemming from the UN and its “Migration Compact of 2018” It is not about which party wins the next Spanish election. It is the deliberate use of mass hostile migration to break a people, a culture, a legal order, a history and a religion, and to rebuild what remains on entirely different terms. 

The woman locked in her home in Ceuta, watching her neighbors’ houses broken into while her own government tells her to be more understanding, is not confused about what she is living through. Her government is the one pretending not to understand.

Expanding Wars: Mideast and European Conflicts Merge

Welcome to the mega-war: Mideast and European conflicts merge, sucking in more countries along the way—even ones claiming neutrality

Jason Ma

Wars in Iran and Ukraine are increasingly overlapping while also expanding, as the U.S. mulls whether to make another attempt at delivering a knockout blow against Tehran.

Last weekend, Ukraine announced that it attacked an Iranian cargo shipferrying military supplies between Iran and Russia in the Caspian Sea. Iran insisted it’s not involved in Russia’s war on Ukraine, though Kyiv has said Tehran is supplying drones to its ally.

Days later, drones hit liquid natural gas tankers at a port on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast, marking the first time the country had been targeted during the Iran war and threatening the Suez Canal’s status as a safe route to get oil out of the Red Sea.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia said it formed a military coalition to protect shipping in the Red Sea as Iran-backed Houthi rebels attack ships using the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, which the kingdom has relied on to export its oil and bypass the Strait of Hormuz. 

Riyadh said 14 countries offered support for the coalition, including Turkey, Egypt, Pakistan, Nigeria and several other Arab and African nations.

Dan Alamariu, chief geopolitical strategist at Alpine Macro, pointed out in a note on Friday that Iran and its allies have struck or threatened nearly every country in the region since the war began in February.

“Egypt was the largest one still untouched, and it had worked to stay that way, keeping open relations with both Washington and Tehran,” he added. “Neutrality did not exempt it.”

The Mediterranean attack, which Egypt attributed to Iran, may impact European gas prices, shipping rates, and insurance costs, according to Alamariu.

That’s as Iran demanded European countries hold Ukraine accountable for its attack on the ship in the Caspian Sea.

“The Iran and Ukraine wars may be connecting,” he warned. “A Ukrainian strike in the Caspian Sea was followed within days by burning gas ships on the Mediterranean. It may not be coincidental, there is a tail risk of some convergence between the two conflicts.”

Hamidreza Azizi, an Iran expert at the think tank SWP Berlin, also saw potential crosscurrents while laying out different interpretations of Ukraine’s strike on the Iranian ship.

One is that Ukraine wants to demonstrate its value as a partner to the U.S., he explained on X last week. Another view is that Israel and the U.S. asked Ukraine to pressure Iran on their behalf amid concerns that any attacks they make on Iranian infrastructure would trigger retaliation against regional economic assets.

A third interpretation is that Ukraine’s attack was in response to Houthi rebels threatening ships in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait.

And according to the Financial Times, Ukraine’s strike prompted speculation in Tehran that it was meant as a warning to demonstrate Iran’s Caspian coast is at risk and could be leveraged in talks with the U.S.

Ukraine is already a player in the Middle East, signing a security agreement with Saudi Arabia in March to provide the kingdom with expertise Kyiv has developed in defending against Iranian-designed drones supplied to Russia. President Volodymyr Zelensky also made visits to the United Arab Emirates and Qatar to reach similar agreements

Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, who served in the first Trump administration, argued that the Iran war ought to be internationalized to include America’s allies in Asia and Europe as well as countries the border Iran, like Turkey, Armenia and Azerbaijan.

“We have to globalize this conflict because it’s affecting international commerce,” he told Bloomberg TV on Thursday. “We’re taking this on too much of ourselves, or to a lesser extent with Israel. So i think it’s time to globalize it and then think about again our broader set of sanctions, blockading the entire country, squeezing them economically.”

For its part, Russia is also looking to expand the map. In recent weeks, it has launching drones at Romania while a Russian missile landed in Poland, violating NATO airspace.

The Center for European Policy Analysis said on Friday that the incursions signal that Russia’s “shadow war” against NATO, which has been backing Ukraine, is moving southward.

That’s after NATO allies in northern and central Europe saw so-called hybrid war attacks last year, such as the cutting of undersea cables in the Baltic Sea and drone-induced airport closures.

Energy expert Daniel Yergin, S&P Global vice chairman, told CNBC on Friday that the Iran war is expanding geographically and geopolitically.

“Think about all the seas—the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, the Baltic Sea, the Caspian Sea—these have all become arenas for oil war,” he said.