Houthis’ Fourth Strike Hits a Saudi Tanker Tied to SABIC

Houthi forces fired ballistic missiles at the Saudi-flagged tanker NCC Ghazal in the southern Red Sea on Tuesday, forcing the vessel to reverse course. It is the fourth Saudi tanker the Iran-backed group says it has struck since declaring a blockade on Saudi ports, according to the Houthi military and independent tracking by maritime security analysts.

Equasis registry data lists NCC Ghazal as a chemical and products carrier, not the crude oil tanker most headlines describe. The ship is one-fifth owned by Saudi Basic Industries Corporation (SABIC), the kingdom’s petrochemical giant, a stake that has gone largely unmentioned in coverage treating this as strictly an oil story.

A Fourth Missile Salvo Hits the Red Sea

Houthi military spokesman Yahya Saree said Yemeni forces used multiple ballistic missiles against NCC Ghazal after the tanker ignored the group’s maritime navigation ban, in a statement carried by Houthi-affiliated media.

The Yemeni Armed Forces carried out a military operation targeting the Saudi oil tanker (NCC GHAZAL) for violating the maritime navigation ban imposed on the Saudi enemy and ignoring the warning calls, using a number of ballistic missiles, and it was forced to retreat and return by the grace of God.

Saree said in the statement claiming the attack.

The claim lines up with a warning from the UK Maritime Trade Operations center. UKMTO is run by the Royal Navy and tracks shipping risk across the Red Sea. Its advisory logging a master’s report of an explosion placed the incident near Jizan, Saudi Arabia, at 2200 UTC on July 27. UKMTO said the crew and vessel were safe and reported no environmental damage, but it did not name the tanker or attribute the blast to an attack.

Maritime news outlet gCaptain, which first reported the Houthi claim, said it had not independently verified that NCC Ghazal was the vessel UKMTO referenced. Neither Bahri nor Saudi authorities had publicly commented by the time of publication.

Martin Kelly, head of advisory at EOS Risk Group, wrote on X that NCC Ghazal was struck by anti-ship missiles while transiting the southern Red Sea and was forced to turn around. Kelly has tracked each Saudi-flagged tanker hit since the blockade began, and counts Ghazal as the fourth.

SABIC Owns a Fifth of the Ship Under Fire

NCC Ghazal carries the initials of its owner, National Chemical Carriers Company. Equasis records show the 49,990-deadweight-ton ship was built in 2014 and is technically managed by Bahri Ship Management DMCC, a UAE-registered arm of Bahri, Saudi Arabia’s state-backed shipping conglomerate.

Bahri holds 80 percent of National Chemical Carriers. The remaining fifth belongs to SABIC, which is also, alongside Saudi Aramco, one of the two biggest customers for Bahri’s chemical fleet, according to the company’s own investor disclosures. Bahri describes the unit as the region’s largest chemical tanker operator, moving petrochemicals, clean fuels and vegetable oils to buyers worldwide.

That ownership structure means a single missile salvo touches more than one balance sheet.

• Bahri owns the vessel through its majority stake and absorbs the direct commercial hit if the ship is pulled from service.
• SABIC holds the remaining fifth and relies on the same fleet to move its own petrochemical exports.
• Saudi Aramco ships cargo on the same chemical fleet as one of its largest customers, tying crude-linked products to the same risk.
• Insurers and charterers now have to price a vessel type that had largely stayed out of the Houthi campaign’s earlier, Israel-linked phase.

The Houthi statement, like most of the resulting coverage, called NCC Ghazal an oil tanker. Its cargo runs through SABIC’s petrochemical export chain as much as it does Saudi Aramco’s crude business.

Why Riyadh Is the Target Now

The Houthis opened this campaign around July 20, when the group declared a maritime blockade against Saudi Arabia, a shift from years of attacks aimed chiefly at vessels linked to Israel. The stated reason is Saudi support for United States military operations against Yemen.

The group’s statement on the Ghazal strike said Houthi forces would keep enforcing the blockade under a policy it called “siege by siege and comprehensive escalation by comprehensive escalation.” Two Saudi-flagged tankers, Encelia and Layla, were the campaign’s first publicly claimed targets, six days before Ghazal. Layla’s transponder, the Automatic Identification System that broadcasts a ship’s position, had already gone dark on July 16, before the Houthis even claimed the strike.

Riyadh has led a military coalition against the Houthis since 2015, and Saudi bases have hosted or supported allied operations in the region for years. The blockade announcement recast that long-running role as, in the Houthis’ framing, active participation in the current campaign against Yemen, and made Saudi-flagged shipping fair game.

The Rerouting Bill Is Already Coming Due

The Washington-based Institute for the Study of War counted at least seven vessels that had changed course to avoid the Bab el-Mandeb Strait since the blockade began. The strait is the narrow chokepoint linking the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden and, beyond it, the Suez Canal.

Underwriters had already begun quietly pricing tankers out of Gulf routes before this week’s strike, London war-risk markets responding to the blockade threat rather than waiting for confirmed hits. President Trump said on July 23 that the United States would hold Iran responsible for the Houthi attacks on oil tankers, according to CNBC, a warning issued the day after the Encelia and Layla claims. Bloomberg separately reported a tanker attack in the Strait of Hormuz around the same period, a sign the risk premium is already spreading beyond the Red Sea.

Buyers far from the Gulf are exposed too. Much of the crude and chemical flows feeding Asian refiners in China and India move through the same sea lanes the Houthis now claim to be blockading.

A Different Campaign Than the One in 2023

The Houthis’ original Red Sea campaign, launched in late 2023, targeted vessels the group linked to Israel, in what it framed as solidarity with Gaza. That campaign pushed much of the container trade around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope and cut Suez Canal transits sharply for nearly two years, with traffic only beginning to recover slowly before this month.

The current campaign names a different enemy and a narrower target list: Saudi-flagged tankers, not the broad category of Israel-linked shipping. It arrives with a stated military logic tied to Yemen’s civil war rather than the Gaza conflict, even though the Houthis have kept the language of blockade and siege from the earlier phase.

The distinction matters for who can avoid the risk. A shipper could dodge the 2023 campaign by proving no Israeli connection. Avoiding this one means avoiding the Saudi flag, or the ports and cargo tied to it, a far harder condition for vessels serving the kingdom’s own export economy.

What Bahri and Riyadh Can Still Do

Saudi Arabia has alternatives to the Red Sea route for some of its exports. Crude and refined products can move east to west across the kingdom through the Petroline pipeline network to Red Sea terminals like Yanbu, bypassing the Bab el-Mandeb chokepoint entirely, though a pipeline network already running near capacity limits how much extra volume it can absorb.

Chemical cargo is a harder case. SABIC’s petrochemical plants cluster along the Gulf coast at Jubail, and shifting that output toward Red Sea ports or trucking it overland adds cost and time that a pipeline swap for crude does not.

For now, the response from Riyadh and Bahri has been silence rather than a public strategy shift. The Houthis, by contrast, have said plainly what comes next: more strikes, under the same policy of escalation matching escalation, until Saudi Arabia’s role in the campaign against Yemen changes.