The Eritrean Dictator: Fueling the Houthi War on Israel!
At the heart of the Houthis’ war on Israel stands the Eritrean dictator, who betrays the Tigrinya people by quietly enabling the Houthis and Iran’s hostility. His silence as Israeli-linked ships were attacked near Eritrean waters including on July 9 is complicity. As Iran’s closest ally, he bolsters its grip on Sudan, destabilizes the region, and fuels hostility toward Israel and the U.S. The dictator must end for the sake of the Tigrinya people, Israel, regional, and global stability.
Israel went to war in 1973, when Egypt blocked the Straits of Tiran, and cut off Israel’s access to Asia, threatening its economic lifeline and national security. Back then, its trade with Asia was hardly significant. Today, the Red Sea blockade poses an even greater economic and security threat. In 2023, Israel imported an estimated $34 billion from Asia, 42% of its total imports.
Today, the threat is from Islamist jihadist militias in failed states like Yemen and Sudan, backed by Iran and the Eritrean dictator. The world knows Iran spreads chaos, but overlooks the paranoid, narcissistic, and psychopathic dictator’s role. He is a central figure in Iran’s so-called “resistance axis.” His actions speak louder than any rhetoric.
Since 2006, the dictator has allied with Iran to defy the U.S. and support Al-Shabaab in Somalia. Sanctioned in 2009, he watched as the U.S. in alliance with then Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi—his rival— who sent troops into Somalia, crushed Al-Shabaab, restored relative stability. Today, the dictator has succeeded in destabilizing Ethiopia.
The Eritrean dictator helped bring the Houthis to power in Yemen to push the U.S. out of the region and reduce its influence, aligning with Iran’s goals. Together with Iran, he armed, trained, and supported the Houthis against the U.S.-backed government of Ali Abdullah Saleh. They ousted Saleh’s government, and the Houthis took over Sanaa in 2014.
He maintains close diplomatic and security ties with Iran, including his visit to Iran in February 2008. He met Iran’s Supreme Leader Khamenei — a rare honor reserved for Tehran’s closest allies. African leaders to meet Khamenei include South Africa’s Jacob Zuma in April 2016, known for backing Iran’s nuclear ambitions, supporting the BDS movement, embracing Hamas, and maintaining a hostile stance toward Israel.
The dictator hosted Iran's spy ship Savis in Eritrean waters for over four years from 2016. When Israel finally targeted the ship in April 2021, Isaias condemned Israel for violating Eritrea’s sovereignty, not Iran. In March 2025, in solidarity with Iran, the dictator detained Azerbaijan’s ships due its close ties with Israel, extending his hostility beyond Israel to its closest allies.
Afewerki is the only non-Muslim dictator in the region, who openly supports Iran’s nuclear program. Not even the Arab dictators allied with Iran dare to back it. He is fully aware of nuclear Iran’s threat to the Tigrinya people, Eritrea’s overwhelming Indigenous majority, who fought Persia (today’s Iran) in the 6th century to control the Bab el-Mandab trade route, to Israel, the region, and the world. This is both unforgettable and unforgivable.
In his 2024 Independence Day speech, the dictator praised and legitimized the Houthis’ attack on Israel, framing it as part of regional solidarity with the Palestinian liberation struggle, and condemned Western naval responses as imperial interference. A third of these attacks occurred within Eritrean waters. On July 9, 2025, a Greek-owned vessel ship was attacked and sank 47 kilometers off Eritrea’s coast. Yet the dictator has never condemned the Houthis. If he won’t stop the Houthis, he can at least condemn their attacks.
The Houthis’ ongoing attacks have blocked Israeli vessels from the Red Sea, cut off trade routes to Asia and shut down the Port of Eilat. Ben Gurion Airport was targeted, and Israel has lost billions of dollars from maritime blockade, flight cancellations, costly defense, and prolonged military operations, all undermining Israel’s economy, security, morale and deterrence.
To the dismay of the Tigrinya people, who share Orit civilization with the Jews, Afewerki openly celebrated the October 7th Hamas massacre. Through his Ministry of Information, praised Hamas terrorists publicly during the first hostage exchange in January 2025, while ignoring their brutal mass murder of Israeli children, women, men, and elderly civilians.
The dictator has become a key enabler of Iran’s regional ambitions, bolstering its influence in Sudan by supporting General al-Burhan and Islamist militias. He has provided them with a safe haven, training, strategic advice, and more in their fight against the UAE-backed Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Sudan is becoming the next launchpad for Iranian-backed operations. Iran only needs a few missiles armed, Islamist militias to replicate the Houthi model in Sudan.
Unlike the Houthis in Yemen, who offer a clear address, Sudan is becoming a Gaza-style powder keg—fragmented Islamist factions like Hamas and Islamic Jihad, a more educated population, a stronger military-industrial base, and far closer to Israel. The threat won’t just be serious; it will be fatal.
The dictator’s diplomatic hostility toward Israel is no less severe. Since 1997, he has consistently voted against Israel at the UN, refused to host an Israeli ambassador in Asmara since 2020, and led efforts—alongside South Africa and Algeria—to block Israel’s observer status at the African Union in August 2021. His record reflects sustained hostility toward Israel and unwavering loyalty to Iran.
To defeat Iran and Houthis, backed by the Eritrean dictator and Sudan joining the axis, Israel needs a strategic regional alliance with the Tigrinya, the indigenous overwhelming majority in Eritrea, based on shared values, interests, and threats and the Yemeni people. Airstrikes alone will not work; the U.S. and Saudi Arabia have tried and failed, despite spending $7 billion and over $200 billion, respectively. The war with the Houthis has already cost Israel more than $3.5 billion.
The dictator is primarily hostile to the Tigrinya people, who are highly homogeneous, without tribal or clan structure. Eritrea, the de-facto nation state of the Tigrinya nation, is the only stable and peaceful state in the region with no internal or external strategic threats due to its secure geography and societal homogeneity. The Danakil Desert, the Nubian Desert, the Semien Mountains of Amhara, and the Red Sea together form natural geographic barriers.
Despite its economic collapse and harsh U.S. SWIFT sanctions — even stricter than those on North Korea and Iran — Eritrea’s internal stability and its ability to mobilize a large national army, thanks to the Tigrinya nation, have allowed the dictator to intervene easily and destabilize fragile neighbors like Yemen, Sudan, Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Somalia. These interventions have turned them into proxy footholds for Iran, Russia, and China against Israel, the U.S., and their allies.
But it also undermines the Tigrinya people’s historic and strategic role in safeguarding the security of the Red Sea. The Tigrinya nation, the organic outpost of Judeo-Christian civilization for over two millennia is Israel’s only reliable, long-term strategic ally not only to defeat the Houthis and push Iran out of the region, but also of stabilizing the Red Sea.
A shared Orit/Torah-based civilization binds the Tigrinya and Jewish peoples, who face common enemies: Iran, Turkey, and transnational Islamist jihadist movements, and a small minority doomed for cultural, political, and economic isolation in a hostile region. Eritrea and Israel are the only non-Muslim majority in the Middle East and Red Sea regions, not members of the Arab League and the organization of Islamic cooperation (OIC).
The Tigrinya offers Israel’s a real opportunity to build a genuine people-to-people relationship that no can offer, an anchor on the Red Sea, a gateway to Africa, and access to vast trade and investment opportunities just two hours from Tel Aviv. Israel maintains a cold peace with Jordan and Egypt, where 99% of the population remains anti-Israel. It could also pursue similar normalization deals with the Gulf monarchies.
For the Tigrinya people, an alliance with Israel means more than security—it means access to Israeli and Western technology, expertise, capital, and markets. It’s what we desperately need to industrialize, urbanize, and digitize our costal area, escape abject poverty, and tackle climate change and desertification, the existential threats to our future.
Change can be achieved peacefully and legally through targeted secondary sanctions on Eritrean mining and a 24/7 satellite TV and radio broadcast that promotes Tigrinya nationalism, economic prosperity, and alienates the dictator through rising Tigrinya resentment, shattering the dictator’s only power: his absolute control over media, narrative, and isolation.
The Eritrean dictator is the key destabilizer — enabling the Houthis and facilitating Iran’s hostile expansion in the Red Sea. He is also the sole obstacle to a strategic partnership between the Tigrinya and Jewish peoples, and their respective countries, Eritrea and Israel.
Removing him would cost only a fraction of what Israel is paying now to confront the Houthi threat. He must go — the sooner, the better. The threat is growing more dangerous by the day, the stakes are higher than ever, and if ignored, it could ultimately break Israel.