US said set to pull one of its aircraft carriers away from the Middle East
ABC News reports that the USS Gerald Ford aircraft carrier strike group will depart the region after three deployment extensions since the start of the Israel-Hamas war on Oct. 7

The United States is set to withdraw one of is aircraft carrier strike groups from the Middle East in the coming days, according to a report on Sunday.
ABC News reported that the USS Gerald Ford aircraft carrier strike group will be departing the region after more than two months in the Mediterranean Sea, where it was stationed in the shadow of Israel’s war against the Hamas terror group in Gaza.
According to the report, the group will return to its home port of Norfolk, Virginia, to prepare for future deployments — as it was originally scheduled to do in early November.
The nuclear-powered Ford, a small, floating city of over 4,000 people with eight squadrons of aircraft, became a powerful symbol of American resolve by rushing closer to Israel after it was attacked by Hamas on Oct. 7, aiming to prevent a larger regional escalation.
A second strike group, the USS Dwight Eisenhower, is currently in the Gulf of Aden near Yemen to deter Houthi attacks on merchant ships. The report said that it is slated to remain in the Middle East for now.
One of the US officials cited by the news network stressed that even with the departure of the strike group, the US will maintain “a lot of military capability in the region” and the flexibility for further deployments in the future.

Two weeks ago, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin extended the deployment of the USS Gerald Ford for several more weeks, the third such move since the start of the war on October 7.
The Pentagon ramped up its military presence in the region after Hamas’s devastating October 7 attacks –in which Palestinian terrorists killed some 1,200 people in southern Israel, most of them civilians slaughtered in their homes and at a music festival, and took around 240 hostage — to deter Iran from widening the war into a regional conflict. In the months since, the Hezbollah terror group and allied Palestinian factions in Lebanon have launched repeated cross-border attacks on Israel, drawing Israeli reprisals in response.
At the same time, US warships in the Red Sea have intercepted incoming missiles fired toward Israel from areas of Yemen controlled by Iranian-backed Houthi rebels. They’ve also shot down one-way attack drones headed toward the ships and responded to calls for assistance from commercial vessels that have come under persistent Houthi attacks near the narrow Bab el-Mandeb Strait.
On December 20, Austin visited the Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, and thanked its crew for their role in helping prevent a broader conflict in the Middle East.
“This carrier and crew are making history. Sometimes our greatest achievements are the bad things that we stop from happening,” Austin said in an all-hands call broadcast over the ship’s intercom. “And at a moment of huge tensions in the region, you all have been the lynchpin to preventing a wider regional conflict.”
The Ford is the US Navy’s newest aircraft carrier. Its air wing has carried out more than 8,000 sorties, more than a quarter of them since repositioning to the eastern Mediterranean.
Captain Rick Burgess, the commanding officer, acknowledged in mid-December that the decision to extend the vessel’s deployment over the festive end-of-year holidays hit the crew hard at first, but that they were doing well now.
“I think everyone went through a few days of just getting through it,” Burgess told reporters.