FORMER Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak famously described the Middle East as “a tough neighbourhood”. Sensible middle-class people really wouldn’t want to go there after dark.

Reporting on the region right now concentrates heavily on the minutiae of developments in the conflict in Gaza, which has seen its repercussions spread from Ivy League campuses to the diplomatic cocktail circuit.

While the war on shipping declared by the Houthi faction of Yemen has been a staple on the Lloyd’s List website since last November, it has attracted only limited coverage in the wider media.

So broader awareness of the drama unfolding in the Red Sea right now is accordingly limited.

Greece-flag tanker Sounion (IMO: 9312145) was abandoned by its crew after being struck by three separate projectiles launched by the Islamist insurgents on Wednesday last week.

Two days later, the Houthis deliberately set it on fire, filming their act and posting the clip on the internet for all to see. The intent seems to have been to destroy the vessel, in a warped display of solidarity with Hamas in Palestine.

This is an organisation that routinely paints itself as the legitimate government of Yemen. Last time we checked, legitimate governments do not typically run the risk of devastating oil spills.

Delta Tankers-owned Sounion is what the shipping industry calls a suezmax. In the popular imagination, that translates to half a VLCC.

It is laden with 150,000 tonnes of heavy crude and if it loses that cargo, the result would be oil pollution on a scale not caused by shipping so far this century.

At the time of writing, this scenario remained potential rather than actualised, although there were reports of a 4 km slick emanating from the hull.

If it does come about, it will not coat a pristine sound in Alaska with viscous crud, and after a decade of civil war, there is no domestic tourist left industry to devastate.

What is will do is destroy the local fishing industry, a key source of food in a country in which 17m people suffer from high levels of acute food insecurity, on UN estimates.

In short, the degree of recklessness involved in what the Houthis have done could turn out to be spectacularly culpable in its self-defeating stupidity.

All is not lost. There is a commercial incentive to salvage Sounion’s hull, and efforts to this end are in train, hinging on the US Office of Foreign Assets Control suspending sanctions on the only tugs in the vicinity that can feasibly take on the job.

By contrast, there is no commercial incentive or legal obligation for anybody whatsoever to foot the clean-up bill for pollution caused by acts of war.

The International Convention on Civil Liability for Oil Pollution Damage 1992 — “the CLC”, in industry slang — expressly absolves owners from liability in these circumstances.

Fair enough, from an ethical point of view; Sounion’s plight is on the Houthis, not Delta Tankers.

And of course, where there is no liability on the owners, there is no liability on the owners’ insurers.

At this point, the oil industry would normally step in. The International Oil Pollution Compensation Funds is a scheme built around a levy on receivers of seaborne oil consignments, with the financial muscle to pay for whatever work needs to be done.

But the IOPC Funds has confirmed that it is constitutionally precluded from stumping up the cash where spills are caused by acts of war.

That leaves legitimate governments. France and Spain threw considerable resources into cleaning up beaches after the Prestige spill in 2002.

Houthi Yemen demonstrably has no such capacity, as underlined by its reliance on the UN to defuse the FSO Safer time bomb.

The only nearby state that does is probably Saudi Arabia. But the Saudis were at war with Yemen for eight years from 2015 and will be disinclined to help unless its somehow perceives there are national interests at stake.

Iran, generally considered to be both paymasters and puppet masters of the Houthis, may come to their aid, but it is questionable.

The last resort would be for the UN or the International Maritime Organization, a UN agency, to get the begging bowl out. But after last year’s whip round to assist with the Safer decommissioning was poorly subscribed, charitable impulses may well be constrained.

Comment is also necessary on the media handling of this casualty. Say what you like about the Houthis, but they have been keen to draw the world’s attention to the incident. Delta Tankers, not so much.

Entirely legitimate questions from both mainstream publications and the shipping specialist press have been met with a blanket public relations agency response of “we can’t tell you that for security reasons”.

The response strains credulity. The Houthis would gain no advantage from confirmation that salvors have been engaged, for instance.

Once again, shipping is benefiting from its supinely low profile. If its luck holds, Sounion’s owners will get away with the hush-hush tactics.

But setting suezmaxes ablaze is like playing Russian roulette, except with worse odds. If the worst comes to the worst, the spotlight will be as unrelenting as it is unforgiving.