The Houthis Want Egypt as Mediator to Keep It Out of the Saudi War

On 26 October Egypt’s House of Representatives, meeting in closed session, voted by a two-thirds majority to authorise Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to take “the necessary measures” to support Saudi Arabia in defending itself if Riyadh asks. Sisi drew the line himself: Egyptian forces would defend Saudi territory and would not attack Yemen.

Sanaa answered with threats. Bukhaiti said any Egyptian support for the kingdom, “direct or indirect, minor or major”, would be a hostile act. Yahya al-Raei, speaker of the Houthi-run parliament in Sanaa, wrote to his Egyptian counterpart warning that the vote endangered Egypt’s security and domestic stability, and threats against Cairo airport circulated online. We set out those threats in why the Houthis are threatening Egypt.

Then the tone changed. In an interview with an Egyptian outlet published at the end of October, Bukhaiti said the Houthis would welcome Egyptian mediation, welcomed Al-Azhar’s call for peace, and wanted Cairo to host direct negotiations with Saudi Arabia. He was careful in one respect: he did not claim Egypt had offered to mediate. He said the Houthis would accept it.

Bukhaiti called peace with the kingdom a “strategic choice”. In practice, a strategic peace means Saudi Arabia recognises the Houthis and their control of every part of Yemen they hold today, lifts the blockade, and lets Houthi airports and ports operate freely. Riyadh would deal with the Houthis as a state, not as a militia or a terrorist movement. Those are the terms of a winner, offered by a movement that is firing missiles at Riyadh.

The invitation is a way to take Egypt out of the war politely, cheaply and without casualties. Picture how it would run. Houthi negotiators fly to Cairo, sit down, fly home, and come back. Saudi delegations do the same. The war continues the whole time, and in the end nothing is signed. Meanwhile Egypt has spent months as the host and honest broker, and a mediator does not send air defence units to one side of the conflict it is mediating.

Instead of supporting Saudi Arabia, Egypt would be holding meetings. That is the result the Houthis and Tehran want, and it explains why the threats turned into flattery so quickly. Iran made the same demand of Cairo in its own words, as we explained in why Iran is warning Egypt against defending Saudi Arabia.

On 1 November Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty said parliament’s decision “does not mean sending Egyptian forces” to Yemen, and that Cairo was working with Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United States to calm the fighting. The substance is correct. The timing is the problem.

Sisi had already said that Egypt’s military effort is limited to defending Saudi Arabia and will not include attacks on Yemen. Parliament gave the mandate to the president, and the president has spoken. A foreign ministry statement on the same point, issued the day after Bukhaiti’s interview, adds nothing and looks like Cairo answering Sanaa. It makes Egypt look defensive at the moment the Houthis are trying to redefine its role. Cairo should wake up to the game being played around it: a great deal is being arranged behind Egypt’s back.

The Houthis, formally called Ansarullah, are a Zaydi Shia movement from northern Yemen backed by Iran. They seized Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, in September 2014. In March 2015 Saudi Arabia led a military coalition into Yemen to restore the internationally recognised government. A UN-brokered truce in April 2022 largely ended cross-border attacks, and Riyadh then held direct talks with the movement. In 2026, as the US and Israeli war with Iran spread across the region, the fighting between the Houthis and the kingdom resumed, with Houthi missiles and drones aimed at Saudi cities and Saudi strikes on Yemeni ports. In July Saudi Arabia proposed talks with the Houthis in Oman, and the Houthis refused to attend.

Egypt has fought in Yemen before. Between 1962 and 1967 Gamal Abdel Nasser sent tens of thousands of troops to back Yemen’s republicans, and thousands of them died. The Houthis invoke that war whenever they warn Cairo, which is why Sisi has drawn his line at Saudi Arabia’s borders.

The Houthi offer arrives as Washington prepares to resume strikes on Iran. Trump has said there will be no new attacks before the 3 November midterm elections, and US officials have told Gulf allies to prepare for a short, intense campaign that could begin as early as 4 November. On 28 October, after a classified Pentagon briefing, Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut called the plan “insane” and warned that it “will lead to devastating escalation”. Our earlier analysis asked whether Trump will strike Iran after the midterms.

Murphy’s language says Trump is preparing something he has not tried before. Every earlier round has failed to change Iran’s behaviour. Trump said he struck Iran to stop it from getting a nuclear bomb, yet his envoys are still negotiating with Tehran over the same nuclear principles. He talked of bringing the regime down. The strikes of 28 February killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, a sick 86-year-old, and the system carried on without him.

Iran cannot match American firepower against the United States itself, so it will hit back where it can reach: the Gulf. If Washington uses a weapon it has not used before, Iran will answer in the Gulf with weapons it has not used before. The region is facing a catastrophe, and the next 24 hours matter.

Qatar is working to stop it. A Qatari delegation flew to Tehran on 30 October, and the talks then moved to Doha, where Iranian negotiators were still meeting Qatari mediators on 1 November, a third straight day.

Israel adds a second trigger. Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloc won 53 of the Knesset’s 120 seats in the October election, eight short of a majority, while Arab-led parties took a record 19. Likud now claims the election was stolen, and Netanyahu has called a coalition that relies on Arab parties shameful. When Netanyahu is cornered, he goes to war. A new round with Iran would bring Iranian missiles down on Israel, rally the public behind him and keep him in charge without a government.

HexaForce is an AI-assisted command-and-control system that the French defence group Thales unveiled on 17 September. Saudi Arabia has taken one to trial, at its own expense, and plans to bring it into service in 2027 if the trials succeed. The system is described as able to take in targeting data from drones, reconnaissance aircraft and watchtowers and direct drones and fighter jets without a communications link that an enemy could jam or intercept.

The detail that matters most is what it connects to. HexaForce can work with Turkish air defence systems, Egypt’s Skyguard Amoun and Pakistan’s Chinese-made HQ-9B. Saudi Arabia already runs a more advanced command network than Egypt’s, and it is still buying a new system from France that can link the air defences of its regional partners. Riyadh is building a defence that does not depend on the Americans.

That fits the one good thing this war has produced. Every Arab state has been hit. A drone set a floating gas terminal ablaze at Egypt’s Damietta port on 29 July, the Houthis are firing at Saudi Arabia, and Iran has struck across the Gulf. Arabs have learned that they have only each other, and that no Arab country, Egypt included, can manage alone.