Traffic through the Bab el-Mandeb strait fell sharply on Sunday after Yemen's Houthis attacked Saudi oil installations along the Red Sea coast, according to Kpler data reported by Reuters. Only 11 commodity vessels transited the chokepoint, the lowest daily total in months. Movement through the Strait of Hormuz also stayed subdued through the weekend even as the United States and Iran paused their strikes.
Houthi military spokesperson Yahya Saree said the group hit Aramco sites in the cities of Jizan and Yanbu on Saturday. The Tehran aligned faction has said it wants to blockade Saudi crude exports, widening a conflict that has already choked shipping through Hormuz. Seven of the vessels that used Bab el-Mandeb on Sunday were oil tankers, three of them inbound to the Red Sea.
Two of those inbound ships are very large crude carriers heading to Yanbu to load Saudi crude, while the third is a Russian linked tanker. Outbound flows included the Hong Kong flagged VLCC New Explorer with 2 million barrels of Saudi and Emirati crude bound for Ningbo, another tanker with 1 million barrels of Russian crude for China, and a third carrying around 750,000 barrels of Saudi crude for Pakistan.
In the Gulf, fewer than 10 commodity vessels a day crossed Hormuz over the weekend. Seven transited on Sunday, including three Iranian linked products tankers heading out of the Strait. On Saturday only three vessels passed with transponders switched off, among them a VLCC going to Qatar for crude, an LPG tanker bound for the Ruwais port in the United Arab Emirates, and a ship carrying Qatari naphtha to Japan.
The combined slowdown across the two chokepoints leaves owners, charterers and refiners in Asia contending with parallel disruptions on both sides of the Arabian Peninsula. With Aramco loading ports now inside the target set and Iranian traffic through Hormuz still thin, buyers face longer voyages via the Cape of Good Hope and higher war risk premiums even as headline oil flows continue.