United States President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that the U.S. had reached an agreement with Yemen’s Houthi terror group.

Since November 2023, the Houthis have been attacking ships in the Red Sea area in solidarity with Hamas and its war against Israel. In March, the U.S. began a bombing campaign against the Houthis to enforce freedom of navigation. It appears the fight between the Houthis and the U.S. is over.

President Trump stated at a White House press conference:

We had some very good news last night. The Houthis have announced that they are not—or they have announced to us at least—that they don’t want to fight anymore. They just don’t want to fight, and we will honor that and we will stop the bombings. And they have capitulated, but more importantly—we will take their word—they say they will not be blowing up ships anymore, and that’s what the purpose of what we were doing. So that’s just news; we just found out about that. So I think that’s very positive. They were knocking out a lot of ships, as you know, sailing beautifully down the various seas. It wasn’t just the canal; it was a lot of other places. And I will accept their word, and we are going to stop the bombing of the Houthis, effective immediately.

The Houthis’ main target since 2023 was Western merchant shipping heading to Israel. This forced most Western shipping companies to avoid sailing through the Red Sea and Suez Canal, opting instead to sail around Africa to reach Europe and North America.

However, the deal is more nuanced than meets the eye. The Houthis have in recent months left merchant shipping alone in general. “The Houthis have not targeted shipping through the Red Sea since November 2024,” the Institute for the Study of War think tank wrote, “making it unclear what concessions the Houthis provided to the United States.”

If the Houthis already weren’t attacking merchant ships, then what was the goal?

Iran

The Houthis are a Shiite terrorist group and army that controls most of Yemen’s Red Sea coastline. They are a proxy of Iran and have the goal of establishing an Islamist theocracy over all Yemen. The Trump administration is currently in negotiations with Iran over its nuclear weapons program.

Sources speaking with cnn claim this has everything to do with the Houthi deal: “Trump’s announcement on Tuesday came after a flurry of diplomatic activity in recent days between the U.S., Oman and the Houthis, according to people familiar with the matter. The understanding between the U.S. and the Houthis not to attack each other is aimed at building momentum for nuclear deal talks with Iran, the people said.”

President Trump previously threatened Iran to back off on its sponsorship of the Houthis. “Iran has played ‘the innocent victim’ of rogue terrorists from which they’ve lost control, but they haven’t lost control,” he posted on social media on March 17. “They’re dictating every move, giving them the weapons, supplying them with money and highly sophisticated military equipment, and even, so-called, ‘intelligence.’ Every shot fired by the Houthis will be looked upon, from this point forward, as being a shot fired from the weapons and leadership of Iran, and Iran will be held responsible, and suffer the consequences, and those consequences will be dire!”

There is no evidence that Iran has stopped its sponsorship of the Houthis. The Houthis have an arsenal that includes ballistic missiles, drones and its own navy. That’s a hefty military for an economic pariah that controls little more than a patch of desert. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (irgc) still has a presence in Houthi territory, and irgc Gen. Abdul Reza Shahlai sits on the Houthis’ Jihad Council.

Yet almost two months after President Trump’s threat, “dire consequences” apparently means a peace treaty.

Israel

The Houthis may not have been actively targeting merchant shipping; however, they have been sending projectiles to Israel weekly. Most of these have been shot down, but on Sunday, a ballistic missile penetrated Israel’s air defenses and struck Tel Aviv’s airport. Nobody died, but it was the first Houthi missile to hit so close to such an important asset. The Israel Defense Forces (idf) carried out retaliatory strikes on Monday and Tuesday. These hit, among other targets, the port of Hodeidah and the Houthis’ only functioning international airport.

The U.S. deal doesn’t include any provision for the Houthis to stop attacking Israel. “Yemen operations were and still are a support for Gaza to stop the aggression,” a Houthi spokesman posted on X.

“With Trump announcing the cessation of U.S. aggression against Yemen,” Mohammed al-Houthi posted, “it will be evaluated on the ground first. It is a victory that separates American support for the temporary entity [Israel] from a failure for [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, and he must resign.”

Apparently, the Israeli government was completely blindsided by Trump’s announcement. According to an Israeli official speaking to cnn, “The U.S. did not inform Israel about its de facto truce with the Houthis.” Israeli officials speaking to Hebrew-language media said the same thing.

Israel has one of the Middle East’s most advanced militaries. But it is also a small country without the global reach of the U.S. military. The Houthis have demonstrated that they are able to severely hurt Israel with very few munitions. And now the U.S. is telling Israel, “You are on your own.” This will embolden the Houthis and other terrorist groups to attack Israel.

When pressed by media about how the peace deal would affect Israel’s security, President Trump replied: “No, I don’t know about that frankly.”

President Trump hung Israel out to dry.

What Is Going On?

The U.S. is conducting the Iranian nuclear negotiations without Israeli support. The details of the deal President Trump is working on sounds eerily similar to the 2016 deal created by President Barack Obama—a deal that the Trumpet and many other mediums have pointed out as helping Iran get a nuclear bomb, rather than hindering it. Since President Trump announced the deal, the Israeli government has voiced its apprehension. A nuclear Iran would be an existential threat to the State of Israel. But these existential threats do not seem to be the U.S. government’s concern. Its main concern is to back out of the Middle East as fast as possible—regardless of what fires start as a result.

President Trump’s main negotiator for the Iran nuclear deal is Steve Witkoff. Per cnn’s sources, he is also the man responsible for the latest deal with the Houthis. He also pressured Israel in January to accept a lopsided ceasefire deal with Hamas. All three of these deals do significant and unnecessary harm to Israel’s security.

When the U.S. government announced January’s ceasefire deal, Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry wrote:

Understand: The Jewish state of Israel—referred to in biblical prophecy as Judah—is America’s only real ally in the Middle East. Our two peoples are tied together. Israel depends on the United States for armaments to fight its war. It is no exaggeration to say that if they lose those, they lose the war. Israel desperately needs America’s help. …

Israel had made tremendous progress eliminating the threat from Hamas. But with this deal, about everything Israel achieved in its war was quickly reversed!

Israel was so close to victory—and now, suddenly, it has lost. It had nearly destroyed Hamas’s terrorists, and now, instead, it has emboldened them. It happened so suddenly that it horrified the Israeli people.

Mr. Flurry summarized: “The reality is, with this deal, President Trump betrayed Israel.”

The Gaza deal was a massive setback for Israel’s war effort. But it was a reversible setback. Israel is making preparations for another full-scale invasion of Gaza—with an apparent deadline to finish the job in months. But the Houthi deal may be an even greater betrayal. It signals that, when push comes to shove, America will not support Israel in its fight against Iran. Whether the U.S. government realizes it or not, it just told every jihadist around the world that it’s open season on Jews.

“This deal has exposed Mr. Trump’s flaws in a way that none of us want to see,” Mr. Flurry wrote about the Gaza ceasefire. “Something is dreadfully wrong here. What Mr. Trump has done here is going to plague him for the rest of his tenure in office! Just watch and see if it doesn’t happen that way—unless he dramatically changes course.”

Selling Israel out to the Houthis is not a changed course—it’s doubling down on his current course.

To learn more, read Mr. Flurry’s article “President Trump Betrayed Israel.”