With Mocha taken, both of the region’s oil chokepoints are contested at once for the first time

Yemeni government forces withdrew from Mocha on Thursday 10 September and relocated south to Dhubab, on the strait itself. Reuters carried the capture on four Yemeni government military sources; CNN on the information minister of the internationally recognised government; Al Jazeera and The National added that the National Resistance Forces had pulled back rather than been overrun, with Presidential Leadership Council deputy Tariq Saleh calling it a “tactical withdrawal” to reorganise. Saleh also confirmed in a statement, per The National, that government units had “suffered deaths and injuries.” The Houthis themselves had not confirmed the advance at the time most Western headlines declared it; their Supreme Political Council said only that clashes had “ceased in the western coast districts.” Rashad al-Alimi, who heads the council, said the developments around Mocha “are not a purely Yemeni affair,” and that Bab al-Mandeb “cannot become another Strait of Hormuz” and “Yemen cannot become another Iran.” That is the losing side describing its own defeat, which cuts both ways: it is an interested account, and it is also the account least likely to overstate the loss.

The geometry is the argument. Defence analyst Wolfgang Pusztai told Al Jazeera that Hormuz is roughly 50 kilometres wide and Bab al-Mandeb roughly 20, which means a force on the Yemeni coast “could control it just with artillery; they wouldn’t need to even use missiles or drones to attack ships.” At the other end, the dispute is about arithmetic rather than range. Ship-tracking data from Kpler, reported by Al Jazeera on 3 September, recorded six vessels crossing Hormuz on Wednesday 2 September, eleven the day before and five the day before that, a ten-day average of thirteen — against President Trump’s claim that the United States is helping around thirty ships across daily, and against the State Department’s position that the waterway is “fully open.” GlobalSecurity’s Day 195 log records Iran stating it attacked ten vessels near Hormuz, which Reuters described as the largest declared wave of shipping attacks by either side since the war began. Declared, not confirmed. CENTCOM’s parallel claim to have destroyed five Iranian tankers carries the same qualifier.

The price signal is equally unsettled. On Thursday The National put oil above $105 a barrel, France 24’s live file put Brent above $106 and up more than five per cent, and Foreign Policy said both Brent and WTI closed above $100. Three publishers, one day, three prints. The clearest second-order effect is Egyptian. Lloyd’s List Intelligence’s Red Sea Brief of 3 September recorded Suez transits elevated for a second consecutive week at levels not seen since the start of 2024, the recovery Suez Canal Authority chairman Ossama Rabie has been banking on after reporting revenue of $4.67bn in FY2025/26, up 23 per cent, against an internal projection of roughly $8bn this fiscal year. The same war that is pushing traffic back into the canal is also the reason the IMF cut Egypt’s 2026 growth forecast to 4.2 per cent, citing higher oil prices and Egypt’s position as an energy importer. Nobody has published the net calculation. If Bab al-Mandeb goes the way of Hormuz, there is no calculation left to publish.

Assessment: What changed on Thursday is not that a strait closed — neither has — but that the two ends of the Gulf’s export geometry are now subject to the same kind of claim, made by parties with an interest in being believed. Distrust the verbs. Iran declared ten attacks; CENTCOM claimed five tankers; the Houthis had not claimed Mocha when Western desks reported it taken. Distrust the round numbers on either side of the Hormuz dispute: Kpler’s thirteen-a-day is a count with a method, Trump’s thirty is an assertion, and the tracker circulating an “effectively closed” verdict with an 85-a-day pre-war baseline is a monitoring site, not an institution. The useful test over the next fortnight is not rhetoric but insurance and routing: whether transits at Suez hold their two-year high, and whether Rabie’s $8bn projection survives contact with a second contested chokepoint. Egypt is the pass-through economy for this war, and its accounts will settle the argument before any spokesman does.