Suez Canal revenues cut in half due to elephant raids
Last Updated on April 30, 2024 5:16 am
Yemen’s Houthi rebels continue to attack commercial ships belonging to Israel and its allies in the Red Sea in response to the Palestinian invasion and massacre in the Gaza Strip.
Major shipping companies are changing waterways due to continuous attacks for six months. As a result, there has been a major impact on the Suez Canal in Egypt. Revenue from the canal has almost halved compared to last year.
On Sunday (April 28), Egypt’s Minister of Planning, Hala El-Said, acknowledged the matter. He said Suez Canal revenue had fallen by 50 percent amid rising tensions in the Red Sea. He said this in a speech on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum conference in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia.
On October 7, Israel launched a military invasion of Gaza under the pretext of an attack by Hamas, a pro-Palestinian armed group. Since then, for the past seven months, the Palestinians in Gaza have been systematically massacred. And the Western countries like the United States and European countries are giving all kinds of support.
And for this reason, the Houthi rebels sympathetic to Palestine have been attacking Israeli and Western commercial ships in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden since November last year.
The group says that they are carrying out this attack to put pressure on Israel to stop attacks on Gaza. Several western countries including the United States are carrying out retaliatory airstrikes to prevent the attack.
On November 19, the Houthis took control of the Israeli-affiliated cargo ship Galaxy Leader and released video of its capture.
Since then, for the past six months, they have been attacking Western shipping passing through the vast waterways from the Red Sea to the Straits of Babel. This has greatly reduced the movement of cargo ships through the Suez Canal.
The head of the Suez Canal Authority, Osama Rabi, recently told a talk show on an Egyptian TV channel that major shipping companies are avoiding the route after attacks by Yemeni armed groups on ships plying the Red Sea. As a result, the number of ships moving through the Suez Canal has decreased by 36 percent. This has had a major negative impact on the Suez Canal.
An important sea route for world trade is the Suez Canal. It is one of Egypt’s main sources of foreign exchange. As a result, the country’s officials have become somewhat worried.
Osama Rabi said, this is the first time that the Suez Canal has faced such a crisis. Till then we were earning better than before every month. Every year I was in a more advantageous position than the previous year.
Osama Rabi said that in January 2023, the income from the Suez Canal was 804 million dollars. In January 2024, it has come down to 428 million dollars.
Changing the route of the Suez Canal by the world’s biggest shipping companies is not only affecting Egypt, it is affecting the whole world. Because it takes a lot of time for the ships to reach the destination, the price of the product is also increasing.