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In a rapid, sweeping offensive in recent days, Houthi rebels in Yemen have seized control of the key port of Mocha and multiple strategic Red Sea islands positioned near the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a critical maritime chokepoint linking the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean. This development has sent fresh ripples through global energy and trade networks, coming on the heels of repeated disruptions to another major Gulf waterway, the Strait of Hormuz, which has elevated Bab el-Mandeb’s status as a vital alternate route for oil, liquefied natural gas, and commercial cargo moving in and out of the region.

The strategic importance of the strait has grown dramatically for Saudi Arabia, which currently diverts as much as 64% of its crude oil exports through an overland east-west pipeline that delivers crude to the Red Sea port of Yanbu, from where tankers transit Bab el-Mandeb to global markets. Just days before the Houthi offensive, this critical Saudi pipeline suffered a drone attack that sent global oil prices soaring and caused damage that analysts estimate will take weeks to fully repair. The attack, widely attributed to an Iranian-backed militant faction operating from Iraqi territory, was the first major blow to Saudi energy infrastructure in recent weeks, with the Houthi advance marking the second.

Mocha’s geographic location just 75 kilometers north of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait puts Houthi forces within striking distance of all maritime traffic moving through the chokepoint. Analysts warn that the group can disrupt or even halt global shipping using low-cost asymmetric tactics, including weaponized drones, anti-ship missiles, and fast attack craft, giving it effective operational control over the waterway. While commercial shipping through the Red Sea has continued largely unimpeded in the immediate aftermath of the offensive, the broader strategic shift carries profound implications for global security and the world economy.

The Houthi push is a major escalation in Yemen’s years-long civil war, which pits the Iranian-backed Houthi movement against the Saudi-aligned Presidential Leadership Council. A fragile truce brokered in 2022 held largely intact until this year, ending a seven-year period of direct Saudi military involvement in the conflict that included air campaigns and limited ground operations. Though Iran has not been explicitly named as a direct party to the latest offensive, regional security analysts widely agree the Houthi advance would not have been possible without Iranian approval and backing. This move, experts note, places Iran and its regional allies in a position to control two of the world’s most critical maritime chokepoints – the Strait of Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb – giving Tehran significant leverage to pressure the United States, the global economy, and its regional rivals.

Global supply chains, already strained by years of disruption, are facing a new era of heightened risk. A 2025 United Nations Conference on Trade and Development report predicted shipping disruptions would remain a persistent challenge through at least 2030, with frequent rerouting of vessels becoming the new normal. The Houthi advance also underscores a clear erosion of United States influence over key global shipping routes, a shift laid bare by recent political developments: US President Donald Trump has confirmed the Houthis have called for Washington to stay out of the conflict, and he has rejected a request from Saudi Arabia’s crown prince to join cross-border strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen.

Faced with growing risks to maritime traffic through Bab el-Mandeb, regional powers are expected to accelerate development of overland road and rail corridors to move cargo out of the region. But analysts warn these alternate land routes will take years to become fully operational, and will never be able to handle the same volume of goods as large-scale maritime shipping. In the interim, the global economy will face continued pressure from elevated energy prices and upward pressure on inflation.

A full closure of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait could also draw European powers, which have so far avoided direct involvement in the US-Iran confrontation, into open conflict. The European Union already maintains a defensive maritime operation in the Red Sea tasked with protecting freedom of navigation, and a prolonged crisis in the region would likely force Brussels to take more direct action against the Iranian-backed Houthi movement. This would mark a major escalation of the conflict, after European leaders previously refused to join US efforts to enforce a military blockade of the Strait of Hormuz or reopen the waterway by force, a decision that drew public criticism from President Trump.

The trajectory of the crisis in the coming weeks will depend heavily on the next moves of both Saudi Arabia and the Houthi movement. Houthi media confirms Saudi warplanes have already conducted air strikes on Mocha airport and other Houthi-held targets in recent days. If Saudi Arabia launches a full-scale bombing campaign, it will formally end the 2022 truce and open a new chapter of full-scale conflict. A key unknown remains how the Houthis will use their new strategic position: as recently as August, the group targeted a commercial cargo vessel in the Red Sea, killing six crew members. If the Houthis launch sustained attacks on commercial shipping through the strait, analysts widely expect a coordinated military response from Saudi Arabia, the European Union, and potentially the United States. The current moment marks a clear turning point, with the Houthis and their backers signaling they are prepared to sustain a long-term conflict to advance their regional goals.

A damning new report from prominent Israeli human rights organization B’tselem has accused the Israeli government of pursuing a deliberate, state-backed campaign to eliminate livable conditions for Palestinians residing in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Titled *The Elimination Project*, the investigation frames ongoing violence by Israeli settlers and military forces not as isolated incidents or a temporary crisis, but as a core component of a long-running political project operating within what B’tselem terms an Israeli apartheid regime rooted in settler-colonial ideology.

The report details a widespread intensification of harm that touches every sphere of daily Palestinian life, from basic access to employment, education, and medical care, to the ability to maintain social connections, cultivate agricultural land, and participate in cultural and community life. In its analysis, B’tselem defines “elimination” not solely as mass physical violence, but as the systematic erosion of the conditions that allow Palestinians to exist as a cohesive people with their own territory, institutions, culture, language, collective history, and political future. The campaign, the report argues, is designed to restructure the region’s geography and social order: it consolidates contiguous, permanently institutionalized Jewish control across the territory while fragmenting Palestinian communities, rendering their existence precarious and dependent on Israeli goodwill. For Palestinians in the West Bank, B’tselem outlines only three stark outcomes under this project: surrender national claims to live under permanent Jewish supremacy, leave the occupied territory entirely, or face violent military crackdown for resistance.

The release of B’tselem’s report coincides with a rapidly shifting international landscape, as a growing coalition of Western nations have recently announced new trade restrictions or bans on goods originating from Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. Last week alone, 12 countries including Canada, Denmark, France, Spain, and the United Kingdom confirmed they were either implementing new bans or considering formal sanctions on settlement trade, a move that aligns with longstanding international legal consensus that Israeli settlements built on occupied Palestinian territory violate the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Top European Union foreign policy official Kaja Kallas has thrown her weight behind an EU-wide trade ban on settlement goods, drawing a parallel between the international response to Russian occupation of Crimea and the need for a unified European stance on Israeli settlements. Speaking to *The Irish Times* on Friday, Kallas argued the EU’s credibility on global rule of law is at stake as long as member states remain divided, urging nations to adopt a unified principled position. While the total volume of EU trade with settlements is currently small, Kallas emphasized that the policy would carry significant symbolic weight. Crucially, Kallas has proposed advancing the ban as a trade measure rather than a formal foreign policy sanction, a procedural change that would only require a majority vote of EU member states to pass — avoiding the unanimous approval requirement that has stalled past action due to opposition from countries including Germany, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovenia.

In the United Kingdom, the new government’s recent sanctions announcement has already drawn criticism from more than 130 British lawyers, former judges, and legal academics. In a formal six-page letter sent to Prime Minister Andy Burnham this week, the legal experts welcomed the government’s decision to align with international partners but argued the measures announced by Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband fall far short of the UK’s legal obligations under a 2024 International Court of Justice ruling ordering states to oppose Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory.

Last week, the UK government formally declared Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory illegal, with Miliband telling parliament he agrees that ethnic cleansing is currently unfolding in the West Bank. Government sources have confirmed that the UK’s new restrictions will not be limited to the West Bank, and will also cover Israeli settlements in the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem.

Since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war in October 2023, at least 1,107 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli soldiers and settlers in the occupied West Bank, according to on-the-ground casualty tallies, underscoring the escalating violence documented in B’tselem’s new report.

For months, Saudi Arabia managed to avoid direct fallout from the escalating regional conflict triggered by the war against Iran, even as smaller neighboring nations became engulfed in rising tensions. The kingdom’s state-owned oil giant, Saudi Aramco, even posted record-breaking profits over the summer, leveraging its strategic East-West Pipeline to route crude exports away from the high-risk Strait of Hormuz, where Iranian-aligned forces had targeted commercial shipping. That safe position has now collapsed entirely.

The critical East-West Pipeline is now out of commission following a drone strike carried out by Iran-aligned militias based in Iraq. Simultaneously, Houthi forces in Yemen have unleashed a wave of missile and drone attacks targeting population centers across Saudi Arabia, including an incident where a Houthi drone was intercepted over Mecca—Islam’s holiest site, whose stewardship forms a core pillar of legitimacy for the ruling House of Saud. The Houthis have denied intentionally targeting the city. These concurrent attacks have left Saudi Arabia fighting on two separate, high-stakes fronts.

On one front, the kingdom’s allied Yemeni forces are scrambling to repel a sweeping Houthi ground offensive across Yemen, while on the home front, Saudi Arabia defends its own territory against non-stop aerial attacks. The timing of the Houthi blitz could not be worse for Riyadh: global stockpiles of the U.S.-made interceptor missiles that form the backbone of the kingdom’s air defense network are running critically low.

Long reliant on the U.S. security umbrella it accepted after World War II, Saudi Arabia now finds Washington unwilling to step up. U.S. President Donald Trump recently confirmed that Houthi representatives had contacted the U.S. to state they have no interest in conflict with America, and Reuters has reported that U.S. officials held secret talks with Houthi delegates mediated by Oman, a major development that sidelines Saudi interests.

In response to shifting U.S. commitments and regional instability sparked by the U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran, Saudi Arabia moved to expand its own security alliances, most notably through the Mecca Pact with Turkey and Pakistan. But like the U.S., these new partners have shown zero willingness to enter direct conflict with the Houthis, a movement that has already proven its ability to sustain heavy battlefield losses and continue fighting. Today, neither Turkey nor Pakistan have deployed any support to Saudi Arabia, leaving the kingdom isolated.

“Saudi Arabia is in a huge bind right now. They are pretty alone,” explained Neil Quilliam, a Gulf research expert at London-based Chatham House, in an interview with Middle East Eye. “The U.S. isn’t there. The Mecca Pact states haven’t showed up. They have few cards to play.”

The Houthi advance along Yemen’s Red Sea coast has already placed the strategically vital Bab el-Mandeb Strait firmly under the group’s control. This waterway is the primary chokepoint for Saudi oil shipments bound for Asian markets. Combined with the disabling of the East-West Pipeline, which fed crude to European markets through the Red Sea, the Houthi advances now threaten both major Saudi export routes. The group is currently advancing on two key Yemeni inland cities, Taiz and Marib; if these fall, the Saudi-backed, internationally recognized Yemeni government faces collapse.

On the ground, Saudi Arabia—which refuses to deploy its own ground troops into Yemen—has no reliable local partners to back. The National Resistance Forces, a militia previously funded by the United Arab Emirates that held the Red Sea coastline, disintegrated almost immediately during the Houthi advance. The only Yemeni faction with proven combat capability is the Southern Transitional Council (STC), which is committed to restoring an independent state in southern Yemen. The UAE’s open support for the STC earlier this year sparked a major rift between Abu Dhabi and Riyadh, and the STC’s demands for major concessions in exchange for fighting the Houthis run directly counter to Saudi Arabia’s core regional interests.

“The UAE knows how to fight in Yemen, but they want concessions to come back in. Saudi Arabia views those demands as anathema to its national interest,” a anonymous diplomat familiar with bilateral talks between the two nations told Middle East Eye.

The economic damage of the recent attacks is already tangible: Saudi Arabia was forced to cancel multiple crude oil shipments to Europe this week, and all loading operations at Yanbu, the Red Sea terminal that serves as the endpoint of the disabled East-West Pipeline, have been suspended. More broadly, the escalating conflict threatens to derail Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s flagship Vision 2030 initiative, which aims to diversify the Saudi economy away from oil dependence. The kingdom is set to host a major global investment conference next month, where it hopes to attract billions in foreign investment for new projects including AI data centers and tourism infrastructure.

Saudi and allied Yemeni forces have launched limited retaliatory strikes against Houthi targets, but Riyadh has not committed to the large-scale intervention it launched at the start of the Yemen civil war a decade ago. The kingdom spent years working to extricate itself from that protracted conflict, and a 2022 ceasefire between the Houthis and Saudi-aligned forces reduced open fighting. However, Saudi Arabia has maintained a strict blockade on Houthi-controlled Yemeni ports and airports throughout the de facto truce.

“A return to full-scale ground war offers little that eight years of campaigning failed to deliver,” noted Hesham Alghannam, director general of the Strategic Studies and National Security Programmes at Riyadh’s Naif Arab University for Security Sciences. Western officials based in Riyadh confirm that Saudi leadership has no appetite to re-enter the Yemeni quagmire, mindful of the damage it caused to Saudi Arabia’s international reputation and arms supply chains.

Analysts widely agree that Saudi Arabia’s hesitation to deploy its own powerful air force to halt the Houthi advance stemmed directly from Riyadh’s reluctance to act without explicit U.S. backing. That indecision, experts say, allowed the Houthis to seize vast swathes of territory in a matter of weeks.

The dual attacks on Saudi energy infrastructure and regional influence do not exist in a vacuum: the Houthis are a core member of Iran’s “axis of resistance” aligned against U.S. and Gulf interests in the region. While the movement maintains it retains operational independence, Middle East Eye confirmed earlier this summer that Iran has supplied the Houthis with new military equipment and advisory support to ramp up their campaign. This offensive comes as Iran was set to hold talks with Gulf states this week to de-escalate tensions in the Strait of Hormuz, leaving Saudi Arabia as the last major Gulf oil exporter operating at full capacity—now vulnerable on two maritime fronts.

The current frozen conflict in Yemen dates back to the 2022 UN-brokered ceasefire, which called for lifting the Saudi blockade on Houthi-held territory in exchange for political negotiations. Those talks never gained meaningful momentum, and the Houthis have grown increasingly frustrated under the ongoing economic isolation. Regional diplomats say the current offensive is driven in part by the Houthi goal of imposing shipping tolls in the Red Sea, mirroring the leverage Iran already holds in the Strait of Hormuz. The Houthis have publicly stated their blockade of Saudi shipping will only end when their own ports and airports are allowed to operate without restrictions.

Military analysts say Saudi Arabia has a range of escalation options available, from calibrated air strikes to a full return to large-scale intervention. The most expedient short-term option would be to pay financial concessions to the Houthis in exchange for a new truce, but experts say that outcome is politically untenable for Riyadh.

“It would look like complete capitulation. Saudi Arabia sees itself as an emerging middle power. They can’t afford to lose face and just give in to Houthi terms,” Quilliam said.

This leaves Saudi Arabia with the path of gradually increasing military pressure, though the kingdom is determined to avoid being dragged back into a years-long ground war that would derail its economic transformation plans. Many Saudi security experts argue for a measured approach: incremental military action to raise the cost of Houthi attacks, paired with negotiations that offer the Houthi leadership a face-saving political resolution.

Other analysts argue a return to large-scale air campaign, modeled on the 2015 Decisive Storm offensive, is the most likely outcome, particularly as no genuine Yemeni political dialogue appears possible in the near term. One key proposal being discussed is an effort to internationalize control of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, to draw greater support from the U.S., European nations, and other Arab partners for Saudi Arabia’s campaign.

In the end, the future of the conflict and Saudi Arabia’s next move will depend largely on whether its key international and regional allies choose to step in—and for now, that support remains missing in action.

For Palestinians across the Gaza Strip, the ceasefire that was meant to halt large-scale violence and bring a measure of stability last October has failed to deliver on its promises. Instead, repeated Israeli violations of the US-brokered agreement have left millions trapped in a cycle of constant fear, displacement, and hunger that mirrors the worst days of active conflict. The personal toll of this ongoing crisis is vividly captured in the accounts of two Gaza residents, whose stories lay bare the human cost of unrelenting pressure on civilian communities.

It was just an ordinary evening in early September when Om Siraj al-Muzeini, a widowed mother originally from Gaza City’s eastern Shujaiya neighbourhood, was making soup for her sick child inside her tent in western Gaza City’s al-Abbas block. Suddenly, panicked shouts cut through the quiet of the displacement camp: residents were running between shelters, asking one another frantic questions about how much time they had left to leave. The sound was all too familiar, and Muzeini quietly prayed her worst fears would not be confirmed. They were. A displaced neighbour soon brought word of a mandatory evacuation order for the entire block. With seconds to spare and no time to sort through her few belongings, she grabbed her sick son and fled the tent, with no clear destination in mind.

“I ran with my son to nowhere. I couldn’t decide where to go. I wasn’t prepared for this, especially since the last evacuation order in my area was issued before the ceasefire,” Muzeini told Middle East Eye in an interview. “The entire neighbourhood fled, including long-term residents and people displaced in tents. Some went to relatives’ homes. I waited with my son in another neighbourhood until the threatened area was bombed.” Shortly after the evacuation order was issued on September 8, an Israeli fighter jet carried out an airstrike on a local building.

This forced evacuation was not an isolated incident. It is one of dozens of similar expulsion orders the Israeli military has issued across the war-ravaged Gaza Strip in recent weeks, with multiple additional orders for different areas released the same day as al-Abbas block’s evacuation. Under the terms of the October 2024 ceasefire, these mass displacement orders were supposed to end, alongside daily offensive operations, while allowing critical humanitarian aid to flow freely into the enclave. Instead, Israel has breached the agreement repeatedly, conducting near-daily attacks and maintaining strict restrictions on the entry of life-saving aid. Now, nearly a year after the current phase of conflict began, Gaza residents say systematic violence against civilians continues, even as global media attention has faded.

Evacuation orders have become a key tool of this ongoing pressure, worsening a displacement and shelter crisis created by Israel’s widespread destruction of residential infrastructure over the course of the war. These orders typically give residents no clear timeline for when, or if, they will be able to return to their homes. Civilians often have only minutes or hours to pack and flee, with no warning of how long the evacuation will last. Even areas that receive no advance warning are regularly targeted by airstrikes, leaving civilians dead and injured with no chance to escape.

“The evacuation orders are meant simply to disrupt our lives and keep us in a constant state of insecurity, even during the ceasefire,” Muzeini said. She has already lost one family member to post-ceasefire violence: “My sister was killed in an Israeli strike near her tent in eastern Deir al-Balah during the ceasefire. So there is really no purpose to these evacuation orders other than keeping the state of war going. Honestly, I feel like we are reliving the war all over again.”

Just five days before al-Abbas block’s evacuation, on September 3, Israeli forces carried out a sudden incursion past their self-declared “yellow line” boundary into the area around Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, forcing a full-scale evacuation amid heavy gunfire. The attack left at least two Palestinians dead, including one child, and dozens more wounded. Official data from Gaza’s Palestinian Ministry of Health underscores the scale of ongoing bloodshed: since the ceasefire took effect, 1,381 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks, an average of roughly four civilian deaths per day, with an additional 4,757 wounded.

For Ahmed Jendiya, a 31-year-old resident of eastern Gaza City who lost his home to Israeli bombing in the first year of conflict and now lives with his family in a tent on the rubble of his former property, the bombardment is only one of three ongoing horrors facing Gaza’s population. “The other two sides are still ongoing: the constant incursions and forced displacement, and the starvation that continues to haunt us every day,” Jendiya explained.

Two months ago, Jendiya packed an emergency evacuation bag, bracing for the day when Israeli forces would extend the “yellow line” into his neighbourhood. The unilateral military boundary, established and marked by Israeli forces inside Gaza immediately after the US-brokered ceasefire, creates a de facto no-go zone that bars Palestinian access to large swathes of northern, southern, and eastern Gaza, with civilian intruders met with lethal force. Since the ceasefire was signed, the line has steadily pushed westward into populated civilian neighbourhoods, and now covers roughly 70 percent of the entire Gaza Strip. Each new expansion is marked by the placement of yellow concrete blocks directly in residential areas. When Jendiya and other displaced residents returned to the area from the south after the ceasefire, the yellow line sat roughly one kilometer from his tent. Today, it is just 200 meters away.

“Every night, it feels like the war has returned. The Israeli occupation forces open intense fire towards our areas, and we barely survive the bullets. The entire area turns into a battlefield, and all we can do is lie on the ground and cover our children’s heads,” he said. The creeping expansion of the yellow line has completely shifted daily life for local residents: where evening community discussions once centered on hopes of rebuilding destroyed homes after the ceasefire, conversations now revolve solely around where people will flee when the boundary reaches their blocks.

“Every evening, the men in the neighbourhood gather to chat and discuss daily matters. In the first weeks of the ceasefire, our conversations revolved around whether our homes would be rebuilt, and whether we would rebuild them ourselves,” Jendiya said. “For the past six months, our discussions have turned to asking each other whether we have somewhere to go and when we should decide to leave. These are the same discussions we used to have during the genocide before the ceasefire, exactly the same.”

For Jendiya, the greater fear is not displacement itself—it is the return of mass starvation that already devastated Gaza before the ceasefire. Even with the partial reopening of border crossings for aid and goods after the truce, 1.4 million Gazans—64 percent of the enclave’s total population—still face crisis-level or worse acute food insecurity, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) system. Before the ceasefire, Gaza’s Ministry of Health recorded at least 453 deaths from severe malnutrition, including 150 children. Hundreds more continue to struggle with malnutrition-related chronic health conditions months after the truce took effect.

Over the past months, Israeli authorities have repeatedly alternated between banning and permitting basic food items, leaving residents in a state of perpetual uncertainty. “Whenever we eat something today, we fear we may not find it tomorrow,” Jendiya said. “Most of the farmland has already been destroyed and there is no livestock left. We are completely dependent on aid and goods permitted by the occupation. We know that if the borders are closed again, we will fall into starvation even faster this time.”

A highly confidential gathering of top military commanders from the United States, Israel, and multiple Arab nations took place in Germany last week to coordinate strategy around the ongoing Israel-US military campaign against Iran, details of which have been disclosed by anonymous Israeli sources to journalists. The exclusive report, published by Axios and written by Barak Ravid — a former Israeli intelligence officer who now works as a political and security correspondent — reveals that the closed-door “private retreat” was arranged personally by Admiral Brad Cooper, the head of U.S. Central Command (Centcom).

According to two unnamed Israeli officials interviewed by Ravid, the meeting included the highest-ranking military chiefs of staff from eight nations: Israel, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Jordan, and Egypt. This gathering marks the first formal collective meeting of these military leaders since the Israel-US war against Iran began more than six months ago.

While none of the participating regional nations have issued any public confirmation of the meeting, Centcom has released an official, albeit vague, acknowledgment of the event. In a short public statement, the command confirmed it “hosted senior military leaders from eight nations during a scheduled conference in Germany” and added that attendees “discussed opportunities for enhancing security cooperation in the Middle East.”

Beyond the broad public confirmation, leaked details from the closed-door sessions indicate that Admiral Cooper used the meeting to deliver a key reassurance to regional partner nations. Despite repeated large-scale Iranian strikes on U.S. military installations across the Middle East that have caused extensive damage, Cooper stated that Washington has no intention of withdrawing its military forces from the region.

Verified open-source satellite analysis conducted by *The Washington Post* has confirmed that Iranian attacks have left their mark on at least 15 separate U.S. military sites spread across the region, including bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman, and Jordan. Hundreds of structures and pieces of military hardware have been destroyed or damaged, with many bases rendered functionally unusable. The most severe impact has been felt at the U.S. Navy Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, where extensive damage forced Centcom to reroute all regional logistics operations to alternate sites.

In addition to addressing force posture, Cooper also outlined U.S. plans to increase commercial and military ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a critical global chokepoint for oil and gas trade that has become a major flashpoint in tensions with Iran.

For his part, Israeli Chief of Staff General Eyal Zamir used the gathering to give attendees a full briefing on ongoing Israeli military operations across the Middle East, per one Israeli official quoted in the Axios report. A key structural change also followed the meeting: Israel was officially transferred from the U.S. European Command’s area of responsibility to Centcom, a shift that opens the door to far more direct military cooperation between Israel and the participating Arab states under the U.S. military command structure.

Not all regional and security observers view the new alignment and Admiral Cooper’s leadership positively, however. Andreas Krieg, an associate professor at King’s College London who specializes in Middle East security, noted that there is widespread underlying distrust of Cooper among Gulf Arab governments. Krieg argued that regional capitals see Cooper as excessively aligned with Israel, overly hawkish toward Iran, and prone to pushing military operational options that carry high risks of strategic disaster for the region.