Yemen's recognised government announced a military operation to retake Houthi-held territory as fighting raged around Taiz, while the Houthis reported Saudi airstrikes on Sanaa.
Published 4 October 2026 · 18:00 GMT
Rashad al-Alimi, the head of Yemen's internationally recognised government, declared on Sunday the beginning of a major military operation aimed at retaking territory held by the Houthis and restoring state authority nationwide. The announcement, delivered in a televised address from Riyadh, came as Houthi fighters cut the main supply road linking Taiz to Aden and as the Houthis reported dozens of Saudi airstrikes on the capital, Sanaa.
Rashad al-Alimi, the head of Yemen's internationally recognised government, declared on Sunday the beginning of a major military operation aimed at retaking territory held by the Houthis and restoring the authority of the state across the country. In a televised address from Riyadh, al-Alimi told the armed forces, the security forces and all military formations to begin executing their assigned missions “in accordance with the approved plans” to “recover the remaining territories of the republic.” The announcement landed at one of the government's weakest moments in years, with Houthi fighters having seized large stretches of the Red Sea coastline last month and now pressing hard on Taiz, the besieged southwestern city whose fall would put the government's interim capital of Aden within striking distance.
The declaration came as the Houthis reported fresh territorial gains around Taiz in the last 48 hours. According to four security and military sources, Houthi fighters advanced on strategic hilltops near the city, seized the al-Safiya area — including a local police station — and brought all traffic to a halt on the main road linking Taiz to Aden. While Taiz itself remains under government control, it has been besieged from the north, east and west for more than a decade, and analysts say that by severing its lifeline to Aden the Houthis have achieved a significant tactical objective even without entering the city. A circulating video showed Houthi fighters inside the home of Yemeni Parliament Speaker Sultan al-Barakani in the Nahr al-Barakani area, and local sources told South24 Center that rebel forces were only a few kilometres from al-Alimi's own home in the Al-A'loom area of Taiz. Government military spokesman Majed al-Nuzaili announced 71 targeting operations against Houthi concentrations and reinforcements in Taiz, a sign of how fiercely the government is fighting to keep the road open.
“Today, I announce the start of military operations to retake the remaining territory of the republic” — Rashad al-Alimi, in a televised address from Riyadh.
Overnight, the air war over the capital escalated sharply. Houthi-run al-Masirah television reported renewed Saudi airstrikes on Sanaa late on Saturday, and Houthi channels said warplanes struck again early on Sunday. Residents described powerful explosions that shook buildings across the capital; one resident told Xinhua that “the blasts were so powerful that the ground shook beneath us… our windows were rattling, and the children woke up terrified.” AFP correspondents reported at least five blasts and saw fighter jets firing missiles at the capital. Reuters photographs showed pieces of shattered glass scattered in a hospital following an airstrike on a nearby building in Sanaa on 3 October. Casualties were not immediately known. The Yemeni military, backed by Riyadh, claimed responsibility for the strikes, saying it had hit “vital targets” in Sanaa as well as in the northern province of Saada on the Saudi border. The Saudi-led coalition itself did not confirm the strikes, and Houthi military spokesman Yahya Saree said 60 air and missile strikes had hit Yemen over the previous 24 hours.
The Houthis answered on Sunday with some of their most ambitious claims of the conflict. In two military statements issued roughly an hour apart, the group said it had carried out missile and drone attacks on Saudi Aramco facilities in Riyadh and in the Khurais area, describing large fires at the targeted sites. The group said the attacks were retaliation for what it called 50 Saudi air and missile strikes over the preceding 12 hours across six Yemeni governorates, and it threatened further attacks on Saudi military positions and oil infrastructure. There has been no word from Saudi authorities on the claimed strikes. A day earlier, the Houthis had already claimed ballistic-missile and drone strikes on an Aramco facility in the Saudi capital in retaliation for intensified Saudi strikes on Yemen; observers reported flames at a site south of Riyadh, though Saudi officials characterised the claims as exaggerated. Fighting has also spilled across the border into Saudi regions, with heavy bombardments reported around the Saudi areas of Asir — where one person was injured — and Najran, according to Spanish press reports.
Al-Alimi used his address to frame the campaign as a war of liberation rather than a war of revenge. He said the operations were not directed against the residents of Sanaa, Saada, Hodeidah or other provinces under Houthi control, and that they targeted no religious sect or tribe. He urged civilians to stay away from military positions, troop concentrations and supply routes, and he renewed an offer of amnesty and safe return for Houthi fighters who lay down their weapons. The council chairman, who is also commander-in-chief of the armed forces, described the announcement as the transition from a mobilisation period to an operations period, saying the government had spent weeks preparing after a decision by the National Defence Council and that opportunities for de-escalation had been exhausted. He called on the international community to support his Saudi-backed government, a direct appeal aimed above all at Washington and the Gulf capitals.
The return to open warfare follows a sequence of Houthi gains that has redrawn the map of western Yemen. On 3 September the group launched an offensive in the provinces of Taiz and Hodeidah; on 10 September it captured the Red Sea port city of Mocha; and on 11 September it seized Mayyun island, the strategic rock at the entrance to the Red Sea, tightening its hold on the Bab el-Mandeb strait. Those advances followed the group's 20 July declaration of a maritime embargo against Saudi Arabia, after which Houthi spokesman Yahya Saree declared that “maritime navigation is safe for all companies except for Saudi vessels.” In August the Houthis claimed attacks on Yanbu and the Jazan refinery inside Saudi Arabia. The escalation comes after the truce agreed in 2022 largely held until this year, when the Houthis launched missile and drone attacks on Saudi shipping and oil infrastructure as a spillover from the Iran war that began in February 2026.
The stakes extend far beyond Yemen's front lines. Regional and western officials have told Reuters that Saudi Arabia and its Yemeni allies are planning an assault on the Houthis, with the Saudis leading the air campaign and Yemeni forces fighting on the ground — a narrow coastal push to secure Red Sea shipping, or a broader multi-front assault on Al-Bayda, Marib, Taiz and Al-Jawf. More than 100,000 Yemeni troops could be mobilised for the operation, backed by Saudi airstrikes and American intelligence. The Bab el-Mandeb corridor has assumed even greater importance this year as an alternative to the Strait of Hormuz, which has been effectively closed by the Iran conflict; Saudi crude alone accounted for about ninety percent of the record 2.17 million barrels per day loaded at Egypt's Sidi Kerir terminal. A sign of Washington's alarm came from Particle's reporting that US officials met at Camp David to discuss responses to the Yemen fighting, suggesting the escalation could draw broader international involvement.
The human cost is already mounting. The renewed fighting has forced tens of thousands of people from their homes, produced hundreds of casualties, and prompted the UN World Food Programme to warn that Yemen's hunger crisis risks becoming, in its words, absolutely devastating. Analysts are divided on what comes next: a limited coastal campaign designed to reopen Red Sea shipping lanes and starve the Houthis of leverage, or the kind of multi-front offensive that could grind on for years without dislodging them from the northern highlands. What is no longer in doubt is that the war the 2022 truce froze has returned in full. What happens next, as one assessment put it, could shift the balance of power in Yemen, further disrupt shipping through the Red Sea — and deepen one of the world's bleakest humanitarian crises.
From Western capitals, the picture is read through the prism of Iranian sponsorship and freedom of navigation. The Houthis are described in Washington, London and Brussels as an Iran-backed militia whose seizure of the Bab el-Mandeb corridor and declared embargo on Saudi shipping threaten not just a regional ally but the arteries of global trade itself. Saudi Arabia's air campaign is therefore cast as legitimate self-defence against a group that has repeatedly struck oil infrastructure and merchant vessels, and al-Alimi's declaration is welcomed as a necessary step to restore a recognised government after years of stalemate. With the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed by the Iran conflict, the Bab el-Mandeb has become the indispensable artery for Gulf crude, and Western marine insurers have already begun repricing war-risk premiums for Red Sea transits — a cost that lands, in the end, on Western consumers.
Yet the same capitals are uneasy about what comes next. American officials meeting at Camp David this weekend were not only discussing how to back the offensive but how to contain it, wary of a protracted air campaign with heavy civilian tolls and of a wider regional fire fed by the Iran war. European governments, heavily dependent on Red Sea shipping, want the corridor reopened but fear the humanitarian bill: with the World Food Programme warning of an absolutely devastating hunger crisis, Western support for Riyadh is increasingly conditioned, at least rhetorically, on restraint and on keeping aid corridors open. In Washington, lawmakers are already asking how many more bombs and how much intelligence support the United States will provide before the war it once sought to end becomes its own. The question haunting every briefing is whether air power can ever win back a country it has already failed to dislodge for a decade.
From Beijing and Moscow, the Yemen escalation is read as another Western-backed war in the Middle East, and official commentary leans heavily on neutrality and non-interference. China, which imports vast quantities of Gulf crude and whose container lines depend on the Red Sea route, has called for dialogue while quietly recalculating shipping insurance and rerouting exposure; its foreign ministry statements avoid naming an aggressor and stress the safety of international waterways. Russian outlets frame the Saudi-led air campaign as the latest chapter in a decade-long assault on Yemen, drawing explicit parallels with the Iran war that began in February and presenting Riyadh's offensive as an American project executed by proxy. State media argue that Washington arms, refuels and supplies the targeting intelligence while keeping its own hands ostensibly clean.
Both capitals are watching the Bab el-Mandeb corridor for what it reveals about American power. If the US-backed offensive stalls or the Houthis consolidate their hold on the strait, eastern analysts argue it will be read as further evidence that Washington can no longer guarantee the sea lanes it claims to police. Behind the scenes, both maintain channels to Tehran — the Houthis' patron — and neither has endorsed sanctions or military action against the group, preferring to let the crisis discredit the Western security architecture in the region. For Beijing, a Houthi-held chokepoint is also leverage: it reminds Gulf exporters that their oil's route to market runs through waters where American protection can no longer be taken for granted. If the strait stays in Houthi hands, the map of who guarantees what in the Middle East will have to be redrawn — not in Washington's favour.
Across the Global South, the Yemen story is above all a humanitarian one, and the outrage is directed at the machinery of war itself rather than at one side. Yemeni diaspora networks, Arab street commentary and much of the African and South Asian press frame the fighting as yet another rich-men's war fought over the bodies of the poor: tens of thousands displaced in days, hundreds dead, and a hunger crisis the World Food Programme warns could become absolutely devastating, in a country where aid budgets were already collapsing. For these audiences, the striking detail of Sunday's news was not the communiqués but the shattered glass in a Sanaa hospital and the terrified children waking to explosions — a war the world had stopped watching, resumed at full volume. Aid agencies warn that if Taiz's last supply road falls, hundreds of thousands could be cut off from food and medicine within weeks.
There is also a distinct south-to-south reading of the shipping war. Countries from Egypt to India to Bangladesh — whose workers, tankers and ports depend on the Red Sea corridor — see the Bab el-Mandeb confrontation as a threat to their own economies, not merely a Gulf feud. For them, the Houthis' embargo on Saudi vessels and the Saudi-led bombing campaign are two faces of the same failure: a great-power proxy logic imposed on a strait the whole developing world needs open, with the poorest paying the highest price in food and fuel. Egypt, which earns vital revenue from the Suez Canal, watches each escalation with dread; South Asian importers fear another round of freight inflation just as their currencies are under pressure. For the developing world, every week this war burns is another week of dearer bread, costlier diesel and emptier ports from Djibouti to Chittagong.
The 2022 truce held until this year, when the Houthis resumed missile and drone attacks on Saudi shipping and oil infrastructure as a spillover from the Iran war that began in February 2026. They declared a maritime embargo against Saudi vessels on 20 July, launched an offensive in Taiz and Hodeidah on 3 September, seized the port of Mocha on 10 September and Mayyun island on 11 September. Rashad al-Alimi answered on 4 October by declaring a liberation offensive.
Taiz remains under government control but is besieged on three sides, and Houthi fighters have cut its lifeline to Aden at al-Safiya while advancing to within kilometres of the city. Its fall would put the interim capital of Aden within striking distance. Aid agencies warn hundreds of thousands could be cut off from food and medicine within weeks, and the World Food Programme fears the hunger crisis could become absolutely devastating.
The Houthis hold Mocha and the strategic island of Mayyun at the mouth of the Red Sea and have embargoed Saudi vessels. Bab el-Mandeb has become a vital alternative to the Strait of Hormuz, effectively closed by the Iran conflict. Western insurers are already repricing war-risk premiums for Red Sea transits, and South Asian importers fear another round of freight inflation. Costs like these eventually land on consumers through dearer fuel and goods.
Expect intensified Saudi-led air operations and a government push around Taiz within days. Officials say more than 100,000 Yemeni troops could be mobilised, backed by Saudi airstrikes and American intelligence. Analysts describe two paths: a limited coastal push to secure Red Sea shipping, or a broader offensive that could grind on for years without dislodging the Houthis from the northern highlands. Shipping premiums will be repriced upward and Yemen's humanitarian crisis will deepen through the autumn.
