Operation Dawn of Yemen has brought air strikes back to a capital mostly spared since the 2023 truce — and civilians are bracing for a war they thought was behind them.
Published 11 October 2026 · 14:28 GMT
At midnight on Tuesday, air strikes rattled Sanaa — a city that had been mostly spared bombing since a truce was announced between Yemen's internationally recognised government and the Houthis in 2023. The head of Yemen's Presidential Leadership Council, Rashid al-Alimi, had recently announced a new military offensive, named Operation Dawn of Yemen, to take Sanaa from the Houthis, who have held the city since September 2014. Government ground forces remain hundreds of miles away from the capital, embroiled in fighting with the Houthis on Yemen's west coast and around Taiz. That distance means the attacks on Houthi positions in Sanaa must come from the air — and the air campaign has already caused civilian casualties. An air strike on Monday hit a location in the Sa'wan area of Sanaa governorate, killing a child and wounding seven other civilians. The government has pledged to continue its attacks until it achieves its objectives, notably the recapture of Sanaa. Whatever the political opinions of Yemenis in the capital, most fear their city — far from the front lines — is about to become a war zone once again.
The immediate trigger is Operation Dawn of Yemen, the government's declared campaign to retake the capital. Since the offensive began, dozens of strikes have hit Sanaa, including an attack on the city's international airport that killed two workers. Both operations were aimed at Houthi sites, according to the government. The tempo is new: for three years the 2023 truce had kept the capital largely out of the bombing, and its return has landed as a shock on residents who had rebuilt lives around an uneasy quiet.
The human texture of that shock is documented street by street. Ghamadan Abood, a 30-year-old courier, said the new wave of attacks had shrunk his feeling of security — at any time and anywhere, he said, air strikes may hit, and civilians could become the next casualties. On Monday he was travelling on his bike when strikes hit Sa'wan, just two kilometres from where he was. With Houthi military facilities believed to be positioned inside the city, and the government sometimes hitting residential areas, the bombing exposes how little separation remains between military targets and civilian neighbourhoods. The strikes arrive against the backdrop of an already-escalating countrywide fight, which Magna Bureau has tracked through recent reporting on the Taiz offensive and the Sanaa strikes.
There is a second front to the operation. Saudi Arabia, which supports the Yemeni government, has come under repeated Houthi missile attacks, including two strikes on King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh — the latest on Saturday killing 12 people. On Tuesday the Saudi-led coalition said Sanaa, Saada and Amran were among the primary sources of the Houthi missile threat, framing the air campaign as an effort to curb the group's ability to strike the kingdom. Each side's escalation is the other's justification.
The fog around an air campaign is thick. The exact targets of each strike are rarely confirmed independently, and the full civilian toll beyond the reported deaths and injuries is unknown — air wars are counted in press releases long before they are counted with certainty. It is unclear how the government imagines the endgame: its ground forces are hundreds of miles from Sanaa, and no timetable or plan for an actual advance on the capital has been made public. The degree to which Houthi military facilities are embedded in civilian areas of the city — the factor that will determine how many more Sa'wans this campaign produces — is asserted by both sides and verified by neither. And the humanitarian unknowns are the largest: how long residents can absorb rising prices and fuel shortages, and at what point fear turns into flight.
Few in Sanaa believe so, and the scepticism is specific. Raiman al-Hamdani, a London-based Yemen analyst, says government forces are big on paper but remain scattered across multiple fronts and fight with outdated gear — they can hold their lines, he argues, but cannot push the Houthis out of their mountain strongholds. The record supports the doubt: the government has failed to seize the coastal Hodeidah province or the Al-Jawf desert province, where the topography is easier than the mountains around Sanaa. As Fuad Ali, a 40-year-old university graduate in the capital, put it — if the fight could not be won on easier ground, how is the mountainous capital supposed to fall?
That gap between declared objectives and military reality is what makes the air campaign so dangerous for civilians. A government that cannot advance overland but has pledged to fight until Sanaa is retaken has only one instrument left: the air. And air power, applied against an enemy embedded in a dense capital, is a blunt tool. Ali himself expects the operation to bring more destruction to the country's facilities and more civilian casualties — the trajectory of every previous attempt, documented in our coverage of the government's earlier offensives. The one thread of optimism he offers is that the government and the Saudi-led coalition have learned from 2015, when huge civilian casualties from air raids drew international condemnation, and will restrain the bombing of the capital accordingly. That is a hope, not a plan.
The Sanaa campaign exposes the structural cruelty of air-only warfare against an embedded enemy. The government cannot reach the capital by land — its forces are hundreds of miles away — so it bombs from above, and the physics of that choice fall on neighbourhoods like Sa'wan. This is not a new discovery in Yemen: the Saudi-led coalition's Operation Decisive Storm taught it in 2015, when hundreds of civilians died in Sanaa air strikes and the international condemnation that followed constrained everything after. The question hanging over Operation Dawn of Yemen is whether that lesson still holds — whether the memory of 2015 acts as a brake, or whether a government that has staked its credibility on retaking the capital will accept civilian costs it once found unbearable. Fuad Ali's cautious optimism is the minority view in a capital that remembers what the sky sounded like.
The second-order effects are already visible in markets and suitcases. In Sanaa, residents are stocking up on food and fuel the way they did in 2015: grocery owner Nashwan, 24, has boosted his inventory of rice, cheese, milk, biscuits, cooking oil and sugar, and bought 100 litres of petrol for his minibus against a coming fuel crisis. When Operation Decisive Storm began, disrupted logistics and panic buying drove prices up; the same pattern is repeating. Wafiq Saleh of the Taiz Centre for Yemeni-Gulf Studies warns that rising food and fuel prices will worsen an already dire humanitarian situation — and the baseline is grim, with the World Food Programme warning last week that three-quarters of families in parts of Yemen are going hungry. Any road closures or a tightening of the Saudi naval posture on Houthi areas would compound the squeeze. The displacement figures are the other leading indicator: 200,000 people forced from their homes in weeks, and Saleh Ayidh — a 50-year-old father of five who fled Sanaa for the countryside for six months in 2015 — is already weighing whether his family will have to leave again.
Watch three tripwires. First, the tempo of the strikes: if the bombing intensifies beyond the current dozens of strikes, the calculation Ayidh describes — stay or leave — tips for thousands of families at once. Second, the supply lines: road closures or a decline in imports, compounded by naval pressure on Houthi-held areas, would turn today's stockpiling into tomorrow's shortages. Third, the ground war: any government advance toward the capital, however distant it looks now, would convert an air campaign into a siege. The Houthi missile campaign against Saudi Arabia — including the deadly strikes on Riyadh's airport — guarantees the coalition will keep answering, which guarantees Sanaa stays in the crosshairs. For a capital that had three quiet years, the war is back, and the civilians can hear it.
Through the Western lens, Operation Dawn of Yemen reads as the internationally recognised government exercising its right to restore its authority — backed by Saudi Arabia, responding to Houthi missile strikes that have killed civilians in Riyadh. The air campaign is framed as a calibrated instrument: striking the sources of the missile threat in Sanaa, Saada and Amran while ground forces grind forward elsewhere. Civilian casualties are acknowledged as the tragic cost of dislodging an entrenched armed movement, and the 2023 truce's collapse is laid at the Houthis' door.
Through the Eastern lens, the bombing of Sanaa reads as the return of the 2015 playbook — a Saudi-backed air war against a capital that has lived under Houthi administration for over a decade, sold as liberation and experienced as terror. The memories invoked are of Operation Decisive Storm, launched in March 2015, which killed hundreds of civilians in Sanaa air strikes. In this framing the government's pledges to keep bombing until Sanaa falls are not resolve but recklessness, and the real driver is Riyadh's determination to crush a movement it cannot defeat by force of arms.
Through the Global South lens, the story is neither legitimacy nor resistance but the arithmetic of suffering. More than 200,000 people displaced in weeks, most from Taiz; three-quarters of families in parts of the country going hungry; food and fuel prices climbing in the capital as residents stockpile rice, cooking oil and petrol. Yemen was already one of the world's worst humanitarian crises before the first midnight strike — and every escalation, whoever orders it, is paid for by the people with the least.
Yemen's internationally recognised government announced Operation Dawn of Yemen to retake Sanaa from the Houthis, who have held the city since 2014. Because government ground forces are hundreds of miles away, the campaign is being fought from the air. The strikes are the first sustained bombing of a capital that had been mostly spared since the 2023 truce.
Yes. An air strike on Monday hit the Sa'wan area of Sanaa governorate, killing a child and wounding seven other civilians. Since the offensive began, dozens of strikes have hit the capital, including an attack on Sanaa's international airport that killed two workers. Residents fear more neighbourhoods will be hit as the campaign continues.
Analysts are deeply sceptical. Government forces are described as big on paper but scattered across multiple fronts with outdated equipment, and they have failed to take easier ground like Hodeidah province or Al-Jawf. Critics ask how a force that could not win on flat coastal terrain can capture a mountainous capital held by the Houthis for over a decade.
More than 200,000 people have been displaced in recent weeks, mostly from Taiz, and residents of Sanaa are stockpiling food and fuel as prices rise. The UN World Food Programme warns three-quarters of families in parts of Yemen are going hungry. Analysts say road closures or tighter naval pressure would deepen a food crisis already described as absolutely devastating.
