Houthi militants are warning of further "escalation" in response to the United States and the United Kingdom launching additional strikes in Yemen on Sunday.
According to the Pentagon, the strikes buried weapons, storage facilities, missile systems, launchers, and other capabilities the Houthis have used to attack Red Sea shipping.
A spokesperson for the Iran-backed militant group has vowed to continue its attack on regional trade "no matter the sacrifices it costs us."
"The US-British coalition's bombing of a number of Yemeni provinces will not change our position, and we affirm that our military operations against Israel will continue until the crimes of genocide in Gaza are stopped and the siege on its residents is lifted, no matter the sacrifices it costs us," Houthi spokesman Mohammed al-Bukhaiti wrote on X. "Our war is moral, and if we had not intervened to support the oppressed in Gaza, humanity would not have existed among humans. The American-British aggression against Yemen will not go unanswered, and we will meet escalation with escalation."
The strikes are the latest efforts to ramp up conflict that has spread into the Middle East since the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by the terrorist group Hamas.
White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said that the U.S. intends to launch more strikes and take additional action in an effort "to send a clear message that the United States will respond when our forces are attacked when our people are killed."
Sullivan also refused to rule out the possibility of carrying out strikes within Iran anytime soon.
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"The president has approached this with a straightforward principle, which is that the United States will step up and respond when our forces are attacked. And the United States also is not looking for a wider war in the Middle East. We are not looking to take the United States to war. So we are going to continue to pursue a policy that goes down both of those lines simultaneously, that responds with force and clarity, as we did on Friday night, but also that continues to hew to an approach that does not get the United States pulled into a war, that we have seen too frequently in the Middle East," he added.
The Yemen strikes come as the U.S. retaliated against the region over the killing of three American soldiers in a drone strike by Iran-backed operatives on an outpost in Jordan a week ago.
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