WASHINGTON — As lawmakers reviewed increasing Houthi attacks on ships in the Red Sea, anti-war protesters confronted a House hearing Wednesday over U.S. military involvement in the Middle East.
Representatives of the antiwar group Code Pink sat in the audience at the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia subcommittee, with their raised hands covered in red paint, chanting “Long Live Palestine!”
Several demonstrators were escorted from the hearing by the U.S. Capitol Police.
“I fear that not only are we going to see a continuation of the slaughtering in Gaza, but we’re going to see a regional war,” Medea Benjamin, a co-founder of Code Pink, told Capital News Service after the demonstration.
The Houthis, a militant Yemeni group backed by Iran, began attacking vessels in the Red Sea, which accounts for about 12 percent of world commerce, after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, purportedly out of solidarity with the Palestinian people.
In a statement from the Houthi military, the group said that it will “continue carrying out (attacks)… until the aggression on the Gaza Strip and the crimes against our Palestinian brothers come to a halt.”
Most recently, Houthi militants fired two missiles at a cargo ship on Monday after a series of attacks from the U.S. Central Command over the weekend on unmanned Houthi targets. A Houthi-backed news agency reported that these attacks killed 17 of the group’s members.
“You don’t hear one of these Congress people say that the way to stop the disruption of commercial shipping in the Red Sea is to have a ceasefire in Gaza,” Benjamin said.
The Biden administration last month announced its decision to designate the Houthis as a global terrorist group, changing a 2021 decision to remove the Houthis’ terrorist status in “recognition of the dire humanitarian situation in Yemen.” This redesignation takes effect on Saturday.
Republicans continue to voice their dissatisfaction with Biden’s decision, maintaining that the Houthis should be recognized as a more severe threat to American interests. GOP lawmakers also called for further trade sanctions against Yemen and individuals supporting the Houthis.
“When President Biden took office, he made a lot of ill thought-out and frankly foolish foreign policy decisions, but at the top of the list was delisting the Houthis,” Rep. Mike Lawler, R-New York, charged during the hearing.
Simone Ledeen, former deputy assistant defense secretary for the Middle East under President Donald Trump, told the panel that the Biden administration did “the bare minimum” in its response to the Houthi attacks.
Ledeen, who is now a senior fellow at the Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas-Austin, said that U.S. partners and allies will see that the country is not taking real action until a more forceful response is initiated.
Rep. Brad Sherman, D-California, heatedly addressed the Code Pink protesters, saying that those who try to prevent the United States from taking action against the Houthis have blood on their hands.
“A durable ceasefire cannot exist if Hamas is (in Gaza) because they’ve already declared they want to repeat October 7th again and again until the blood of Israelis flows again and again,” Sherman shouted over the protesters’ chants.