Second in a series on the maritime chokepoints that global trade depends on. Part one covered the Strait of Malacca.
The Bab el-Mandeb is an 18-mile gap between Yemen and Djibouti, at the southern end of the Red Sea. Its name translates roughly as the Gate of Tears. It connects the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden and, through the Suez Canal at the other end, the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean.
It is the chokepoint whose traffic has changed most dramatically in the past two years, in both directions, and it is currently carrying nearly double what it did a year ago.
The volume swing
EIA figures show the pattern clearly. Oil flows through the Bab el-Mandeb ran at 5.7 million barrels a day in 2020, rising to 9.3 million by 2023. In 2024 they collapsed to 4.1 million, as attacks on shipping in the Red Sea pushed traffic around the Cape of Good Hope instead. Flows stayed near that level through the first half of 2025, at 4.2 million.
In the second quarter of 2026 they reached 8.1 million barrels a day.
The reversal has a single cause: the Strait of Hormuz. With the Gulf’s main exit constrained, Saudi Arabia has been pushing crude westward across its own territory to the Red Sea port of Yanbu and out through the Bab el-Mandeb. Yanbu was loading around 240,000 barrels a day a year ago. By June it was doing 3.5 million.
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Why that is uncomfortable
Saudi Arabia solved a problem by routing around Hormuz. In doing so it concentrated a very large share of its exports on a different narrow passage — one bordered by Yemen, where the Houthi movement has demonstrated both the capability and the willingness to attack shipping.
The EIA noted in its August outlook that crude prices were pushed higher not only by renewed attacks on ships transiting Hormuz but by a new blockade threat against Saudi exports through the Bab el-Mandeb. The agency observed that the strait is both a major chokepoint in its own right and one of the alternative routes used to avoid Hormuz — which is precisely the difficulty. The alternative and the original are both vulnerable, and now they are correlated.
Saudi Arabia retains the option of the Suez Canal and the SUMED pipeline in Egypt, the EIA added, but those routes take longer, cost more and are more limited in capacity.
What else moves through
Oil is not the whole story. The Bab el-Mandeb is the gateway to the Suez Canal, so a large share of container traffic between Asia and Europe passes through it — manufactured goods, components, food.
One category has gone to zero. LNG flows through the Bab el-Mandeb ran at around 4 billion cubic feet a day from 2020 through 2023, and then stopped entirely in 2024 and the first half of 2025. Gas carriers are expensive, slow and carry a cargo that cannot be insured cheaply through a war-risk area, so operators abandoned the route completely rather than accept the premium.
That is worth noting as a general pattern: when a route becomes risky, the highest-value and most safety-sensitive cargoes leave first, and they are the slowest to come back.
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The Cape alternative
The fallback is to go around Africa. Flows past the Cape of Good Hope rose from 6.2 million barrels a day in 2023 to 9.3 million in 2024 — a direct measure of traffic diverted from the Red Sea.
The Cape route works. It adds roughly 10 to 14 days on an Asia-to-Europe voyage and burns considerably more fuel. As with Malacca, the cost is not that goods fail to arrive; it is that the world’s shipping capacity is effectively reduced, because every vessel spends longer at sea per cargo delivered. Freight rates rise for everyone, including for trade that never went near the Red Sea.
Who lives on the shoreline
One dimension gets less attention than it deserves. The countries on either side of the Bab el-Mandeb — Yemen, Djibouti, Eritrea, and Somalia nearby — include some of the poorest in the world, and Yemen has been at war for over a decade.
Yemen’s humanitarian situation depends heavily on imports arriving through Red Sea ports. When shipping avoids the strait, aid and commercial food imports become slower and more expensive for a population already facing severe shortages. The people most exposed to disruption at this chokepoint are not the buyers of the oil. They are the people living beside it.
From Plain Sight News
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