Yemen Slides Toward Full-Scale War as Truce Collapses
Fighting in Yemen escalated sharply, with government forces claiming 81 attacks on Houthi positions in a day and the Houthis claiming drone strikes on an airport and an oil facility in southern Saudi Arabia. The UN warned that the four-year truce “appears to be collapsing” and urged both sides to pull back from full-scale conflict. A tanker was also boarded off the coast and diverted, reviving fears for Red Sea shipping.
Yemen’s war, frozen rather than ended by the 2022 truce, is reigniting on land, at sea and now potentially across the Saudi border, and the humanitarian stakes are enormous in a country where some 18 million people already struggle to find enough food. The Houthis’ claimed strikes on Najran, if confirmed, would mark a dangerous widening back toward the cross-border war Riyadh spent years trying to exit. The renewed boarding of shipping raises the spectre of fresh disruption to a Red Sea route already rattled by the Gulf crisis. The UN’s warning is stark, but with attention fixed on Gaza and Iran, Yemen risks sliding back into catastrophe largely unwatched. Watch whether Saudi Arabia confirms the strikes and is drawn back in.