{"id":44927,"date":"2026-03-29T08:39:50","date_gmt":"2026-03-29T02:54:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/?p=44927"},"modified":"2026-03-29T08:39:50","modified_gmt":"2026-03-29T02:54:50","slug":"yemens-houthis-enter-iran-war-with-attacks-on-israel-while-us-marines-arrive-in-region","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/yemens-houthis-enter-iran-war-with-attacks-on-israel-while-us-marines-arrive-in-region\/","title":{"rendered":"Yemen’s Houthis enter Iran war with attacks on Israel, while US Marines arrive in region"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Reuters:<\/strong> The risk of an expanded Iran war grew as Yemen\u2019s Iran-aligned Houthis on Saturday launched their first attacks on Israel since the start of the conflict, even as additional US forces reached the Middle East.<\/p>\n

Washington has dispatched thousands of Marines to the Middle East. The first of two contingents arrived on Friday on an amphibious assault ship, the US military said on Saturday.<\/p>\n

On Saturday, the Washington Post reported US officials said the Pentagon is preparing for weeks of ground operations in Iran. Whether President Donald Trump would approve plans for deploying ground troops remained uncertain, the Post reported.<\/p>\n

The war, launched on February 28 with US and Israeli strikes on Iran, has spread across the Middle East, killing thousands and hitting the world economy with the biggest-ever disruption to global energy supplies.<\/p>\n

On Friday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the US could achieve its aims without ground troops. But he acknowledged it was deploying some to the region so Trump would have \u201cmaximum\u201d flexibility to adjust strategy.<\/p>\n

The Pentagon was also expected to deploy thousands of soldiers from the US Army\u2019s 82nd Airborne Division.<\/p>\n

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian spoke to Pakistan\u2019s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, whose government hosts a meeting with the Turkish and Saudi foreign ministers on Sunday to seek \u2060to ease regional tensions.<\/p>\n

Lebanese journalists, rescue workers hit<\/strong><\/p>\n

On Saturday, Israel said it had carried out a wave of attacks on Tehran, targeting what the military said were infrastructure sites belonging to Iran\u2019s government.<\/p>\n

It also hit targets in Lebanon, where it has resumed its war against Iran-backed Hezbollah, killing three Lebanese journalists in a strike on a media vehicle, Lebanon\u2019s Al Manar TV reported, as well as a Lebanese soldier. A follow up strike on the rescue workers sent to assist them also caused fatalities.<\/p>\n

Israel\u2019s military said it had targeted one of the journalists, accusing him of being part of a Hezbollah intelligence unit, and saying he had reported on locations of Israeli soldiers.<\/p>\n

Iran kept up attacks on Israel and several Gulf states after hitting an air base in Saudi Arabia on Friday and wounding 12 US military personnel, two of them seriously, in one of the most serious breaches of US air defences so far.<\/p>\n

Air defences shot down a drone near the residence of the leader of the Iraqi Kurdish ruling party, Masoud Barzani, in Erbil, security sources told Reuters early Sunday. Security sources said on Saturday that a separate drone attack targeted the home of the president of Iraq\u2019s Kurdistan Region.<\/p>\n

Houthis can strike targets far from Yemen<\/strong><\/p>\n

Israel, which regularly faced missile attacks from the Houthis before the war, confirmed a missile had been fired at it from Yemen. There were no reports of casualties or damage.<\/p>\n

The attack pointed to a potential new threat to global shipping, already \u2060hit by the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the conduit for about a fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas supplies.<\/p>\n

Houthi military spokesperson Yahya Saree later said the group carried out a second attack on Israel in less than 24 hours and vowed more strikes to come.<\/p>\n

The Houthis have shown an ability to strike targets far beyond Yemen and disrupt shipping lanes around the Arabian Peninsula and the Red Sea, as they did in support of Hamas in the Gaza war.<\/p>\n

Markets alarmed by prospect of ongoing war<\/strong><\/p>\n

With US midterm elections due in November, the increasingly unpopular war has weighed on President Donald Trump\u2019s Republican Party and he has appeared eager to end it soon, while also threatening escalation.<\/p>\n

Demonstrators took to city streets across the US on Saturday in anti-Trump rallies described by organisers as a call to \u2060action against the war on Iran.<\/p>\n

Trump has threatened to hit Iranian power stations and other energy infrastructure if Iran does not open the Strait of Hormuz. But he has extended a deadline he had imposed for this week, giving Iran another 10 days to respond.<\/p>\n

Iranian threats to attack ships in the strait have kept most oil tankers from attempting the waterway. A few vessels have traversed the strait without issue, including ships under the flags of Pakistan and India, after Iranian assurances of safe passage.<\/p>\n

Iran has agreed to allow an additional \u206020 Pakistani-flagged vessels to pass through the strait, with two ships permitted to transit daily, Pakistan\u2019s Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar said.<\/p>\n

Israel has targeted Iran\u2019s nuclear infrastructure, and the head of Russia\u2019s state nuclear corporation Rosatom, which has evacuated staff from the Bushehr nuclear power plant on the Gulf coast, said the attacks threatened nuclear safety.<\/p>\n

Pezeshkian said Iran would \u201cretaliate strongly if our infrastructure or economic centers are targeted\u201d.<\/p>\n

Iranian attacks were reported in multiple areas across the Gulf, including Kuwait, the United Arab \u2060Emirates and Oman.<\/p>\n

An Iranian airstrike hit the Israeli village of Eshtaol, near Jerusalem. Seven people were hospitalized, Israel\u2019s ambulance service said. Aluminium Bahrain, also known as Alba, confirmed that its facilities were targeted in an Iranian attack on Saturday, Bahrain\u2019s state news agency reported.<\/p>\n

In Iran, media said at least five people were killed in a US-Israeli attack on a residential unit in the northwestern city of Zanjan, and in Tehran, the Iran University of Science and Technology was struck.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reuters: The risk of an expanded Iran war grew as Yemen\u2019s Iran-aligned Houthis on Saturday launched their first attacks on Israel since the start of the conflict, even as additional US forces reached the Middle East. Washington has dispatched thousands of Marines to the Middle East. The first of two contingents arrived on Friday on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44928,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44927","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44927"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44927"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44927\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44929,"href":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44927\/revisions\/44929"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44928"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44927"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44927"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44927"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}