No immediate plans for further Yemen strikes, says UK armed forces minister

There are no immediate plans for more attacks on Houthi targets in Yemen, a UK defence minister has said, as opposition parties pressed the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, to make a statement to parliament as early as possible.

Labour broadly backed the operation – though it asked for a Commons statement and details of the legal position behind the attack – but the Liberal Democrats and some MPs on the left of Labour said there should have been a vote on the action.

“Parliament should not be bypassed,” said Layla Moran, the Lib Dems’ foreign affairs spokesperson. “Rishi Sunak must announce a retrospective vote in the House of Commons on these strikes and recall parliament this weekend.

“We remain very concerned about the Houthis’ attacks. But that makes it all the more important to ensure that MPs are not silenced on the important issue of military action.”

The strikes on Thursday night were the first to be launched against Houthi forces since they started targeting international shipping in the Red Sea, a key international trade route.

The Ministry of Defence said four Royal Air Force jets struck two Houthi facilities that were involved in the targeting of HMS Diamond and US navy vessels on Tuesday. One was a site in Bani, in the country’s north-west, and the other was the Abbs airfield, near the west coast. The US air force said it struck more than 60 targets at 16 sites in Yemen.

The UK and US had non-operational support from Australia, Bahrain, Canada and the Netherlands.

On Thursday evening, before the strikes took place, some Labour MPs also called for a vote. John McDonnell, the former shadow chancellor, tweeted: “There should be no military action without parliamentary approval. If we have learnt anything in recent years it’s that military intervention in the Middle East always has dangerous [and] often unforeseen consequences. There is a risk of setting the region alight.”

During a round of broadcast interviews on Friday morning, James Heappey, the armed forces minister, said the air and missile strikes in Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen by the US and UK was not a prelude to a wider conflict.

He told BBC Breakfast: “Clearly there is nervousness amongst those partners in the region that there could be some sort of escalation, but we were confident that these limited, proportionate, necessary strikes that went in last night were what was necessary to disrupt the Houthis’ ability to attack our warships that are protecting shipping in the southern Red Sea. And clearly nobody should see this as part of anything bigger.”

Heappey added that the government’s “legal position is sound”, and that no more UK strikes are planned for the moment.

Ministers were summoned to a cabinet call on Thursday evening before the attacks, with Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, and John Healey, the shadow defence secretary, briefed afterwards.

Starmer said subsequently that a summary of the government’s legal position on the attacks should be published.

“I do want the prime minister obviously to make a statement to parliament as soon as possible because the scope, nature and extent of the operation needs to be explained,” he added.

In a separate trip to Ukraine on Friday that was not billed in advance by No 10, Sunak met his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, as the UK announced it would provide further military aid to the country over the coming year.

Sunak said that the UK, which has been one of Kyiv’s staunchest supporters since Russia’s invasion, would boost its support in the next financial year to £2.5bn, an increase of £200m on the previous two years.

The US-UK attacks on more than 60 targets in Yemen in the early hours of Friday local time, followed a wave of attacks by the rebels on international shipping in the Red Sea.