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| - A video of a cargo ship on fire is being shared online with the suggestion it was attacked by the Houthis.
One post with more than 1,600 shares on X (formerly Twitter) has the caption: “HOUTHIS are unstoppable Us, Israel & their europian allies are failed [sic] to stop houthi missile, drone attacks. Ignoring houthi warnings is not good & is very expensive.”
The Houthi rebel group in Yemen—not the recognised Yemeni government—began targeting commercial ships in the Red Sea in the month following the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel. The Houthis reportedly initially said they were targeting ships connected with Israel, or those heading to or from the country, but many vessels attacked had no connection to Israel.
However, the video being shared on social media predates these events, and is not related to the rebel group or conflict in the Middle East.
The clip actually shows a fire onboard a container ship off the coast of Colombo, Sri Lanka in 2021. The Singapore-flagged cargo ship, the X-Press Pearl, burned for almost two weeks before partially sinking on 2 June. Many clips of the incident have been shared online. Twenty-five crew members were evacuated with two suffering minor injuries.
The X-Press Pearl was carrying chemicals and cosmetics, and Sri Lankan officials reportedly believed a nitric acid leak was the cause of the fire. Billions of tiny plastic pellets and chemicals leaked into the Indian Ocean, causing significant damage to marine wildlife and local communities.
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What is happening in the Red Sea?
It’s unclear exactly how many Houthi attacks there have been since October 2023, with figures ranging between 130 and 190, but at least four sailors have been killed. Many ships have been rerouted to avoid passing through the Red Sea by travelling around South Africa, which reportedly adds at least 10 days and significant costs to the transit.
PortWatch, a database run by the IMF and Oxford University, shows the average daily transits (over seven days) through the Suez Canal—which connects the Red Sea to the Mediterranean—has fallen to 29 in the week to 12 November compared to 74 over the same period in 2023.
We recently checked the unevidenced claim that the Houthis had stopped their operations in international waters following President-elect Donald Trump winning the US election.
This is not the first time we’ve seen this video being miscaptioned—we wrote about posts sharing the footage in December 2023 with claims it showed an Israeli cargo ship “sunk in the Red Sea”.
It’s important to consider whether something is genuine before sharing—our guides to spotting misleading images and videos should help you to do this.
You can find more of our work checking claims related to the Middle East on our website.
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