Yemen’s Houthis launch ballistic missile attacks on al-Makha and Marib

The armed forces of Yemen’s internationally recognised government have accused the Houthis of launching another round of ballistic missile attacks on the Red Sea port city of al-Makha and on residential areas in the central city of Marib.

Yemeni forces did not state whether the attacks on Monday caused any casualties.

The attacks came a day after Houthi missiles killed at least seven people and wounded 30 others in al-Makha, which is also known as Mocha. The strikes caused extensive damage at the city’s port area.

Elsewhere in Yemen on Monday, a Houthi drone strike killed two Yemeni government soldiers and wounded seven others in the south-central province of Shabwa, according to local media reports.

Yemeni forces, in a series of posts on X, said they targeted Houthi rebels and their sites in eastern al-Jawf province, northwestern Saada province and the al-Tibas area of central Marib province.

The tit-for-tat attacks are the deadliest in years in Yemen’s civil war and mark a major escalation in the conflict, which has been reignited by the war launched by the United States and Israel against Iran on February 28.

The Iran-backed Houthis captured Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, in September 2014, with a Saudi-led coalition intervening in March 2015 on the side of the government.

The conflict, which has killed hundreds of thousands of people, deteriorated into a deadlock, and the warring parties reached a truce in April 2022 that ended major fighting across the country.

But the violence reignited on July 13 with a Saudi air strike on the runway of Sanaa airport, preventing the landing of an Iranian flight carrying a high-ranking Houthi delegation.

Following the strike, the Houthis attacked the Abha airport in southwestern Saudi Arabia and announced a blockade on Saudi shipping in the Red Sea. They have also attacked Saudi vessels as well as oil facilities in the kingdom, adding further disruption to the global economy.

The Saudi-led coalition in turn has struck Houthi-controlled Hodeidah and Kamaran, Yemen’s largest island in the Red Sea. It has also reinforced Yemeni troops along the front lines in Yemen to launch a ground offensive on Houthis.

Meanwhile, the United Nations has called for restraint.

“Yemen today faces a greater risk of renewed large-scale conflict than at any point since the UN-brokered truce of April 2022,” UN envoy Hans Grundberg warned on Friday.

The escalation, he said, risks “jeopardising the gains of the 2022 truce … while also drawing the country into a broader regional confrontation, with devastating consequences for its people”.