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Comment by adolph | Hacker News Reader

> Most of the ships they target are either own fully or partially by Israeli companies, or are headed to Israeli ports

As I understand it, this is not true. If you have a citation listing strikes with manifests, I’d appreciate being able to update my priors.

Wikipedia lists 17 strikes. I see that 3 have some Israeli ownership or port of call: Galaxy Leader, Symi, and Strinda.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houthi_involvement_in_the_Isra...

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It doesn’t matter that some ships weren’t nominally owned by Israel but in reality owned by shell corporations in turn owned by Israel-supporting billionaires.

Do you have a fact source or just vague associations? The statement at question is "Most of the ships they target are either own fully or partially by Israeli companies, or are headed to Israeli ports"

From source Wikipedia, this is not true. Only 3 of 17 have Israeli ownership or ports of call. Do you have a source for Israeli ownership or ports of call for 6 more ships?

Also, your stated class of "owned by Israel-supporting billionaires" is moving the goalposts. That is not the announced Houthi criteria.

The “goalposts” are defined by the Houthis and unless you think they’re careless or have ulterior motives compared to their stated aim of stopping the Israeli genocide of Palestine, then there must be other reasons they have. For one I’ve heard they take action if a ship doesn’t respond to their hails.

Do you have a fact source or just things you’ve heard?

My facts were from various Twitter posts - I don't have them on hand but you can search fairly easily. It's pretty clear that wikipedia data doesn't cover this level of detail - but using game theory - it's pretty reasonable that the Houthis have a political goal and being random or scattershot in their attacks would dilute that goal.

Do you have a single fact source that differs from the Wikipedia list?

The Houthi org certainly has some motivation. Do the facts match the claimed motivation or not?

Swan Atlantic has Israeli connections as well from the Wikipedia list. Clearly this list is being updated as info unfolds. Also the lack of a link on the Wikipedia page does not mean there is no link, and just as you missed Swan Atlantic (and I didn't even go through the full list), there can be other ships with Israeli connections that you didn't catch (or entries that were updated since the time you checked)

Do you have a single fact source that differs from the Wikipedia list?

As far as I can tell Swan Atlantic is owned by a Norwegian company without Israeli ties and had no Israeli ports of call. That means the observed Houthi behavior is still 14/17 (82%) not-Israeli-related.

The Houthi behavior is significantly different from Houthi claims of motivation.

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