World News
Yemen's government says 84 of its troops died in a day as the Houthi push towards Bab al-Mandab passes 300 dead
By Staff Writer | 7 September 2026
Four days of fighting west of Taiz and in southern Hodeidah have cut the road to the Red Sea port of Mokha, according to a government military official, and sent more than 1,700 households from their homes. Both sides put out their own casualty figures and neither confirms the other's.
The toll from the fighting in south-west Yemen passed 300 on Sunday, according to a tally compiled from military and medical sources on both sides, in the deadliest flare-up since the 2022 ceasefire collapsed in July. Two military officials with the government forces said 84 of their troops were killed between midday on Saturday and early on Sunday, most of them in missile attacks. Four Houthi military sources put their own dead over the same period at 57. Each figure is that side's own, and the tally that combines them counts combatants and some civilians together.
The Houthis launched the offensive early on Thursday with simultaneous ground attacks on government positions in southern Hodeidah and in three districts west of Taiz city, Maqbanah, Jabal Habashi and Al-Kadaha, after shelling those positions with dozens of artillery rounds and firing at least 12 missiles and drones. The Yemeni Armed Forces later put the missile count at 14 and said several drones had been shot down over Taiz by newly acquired air defences. Government officials described it as the largest Houthi assault since the United Nations brokered the 2022 truce, which expired within months but had until this summer largely held on the ground.
The Houthi threat is no longer confined to Yemen and international shipping in the Red Sea, but rather to regional and international security
Moammar Eryani, Minister of Information of Yemen
The road to Mokha
The aim of the offensive, as government officials and the Houthis' own statements describe it, is the coast. The Houthis are trying to cut the government-held port of Mokha, which has been under drone and missile attack for weeks, from Taiz city, and to advance towards the areas bordering Bab al-Mandab, the strait at the southern entrance to the Red Sea. A government military official said the Houthis had succeeded on Saturday evening in cutting the road linking Taiz to Mokha. Another said fighting had eased in the early hours of Sunday, that government forces had established positions north of Hays after advancing there, less than 30 kilometres inland from the Red Sea coast, but that the Houthis had advanced west of Taiz and south of Hays in their push towards the strait.
The United Nations humanitarian office said on Friday that an estimated 1,790 households had been displaced by intense shelling and clashes in the Maqbanah and Jabal Habashi districts. Families from both were sheltering at Al-Bareen camp for the internally displaced on Saturday, and on Sunday more were setting up shelters in a second camp in the area with mattresses and livestock. A spokesman for the United Nations Secretary-General said he was deeply concerned by the ongoing military clashes and warned of devastating political, economic and security consequences for Yemen and its people.
What the government says it will do
Rashad Al-Alimi, chairman of the Presidential Leadership Council, said on Thursday night after speaking to field commanders that the government would deliver a decisive response, that the Houthis had not made major gains and that government forces were now better prepared and more experienced in confronting their attacks. On Friday government troops recaptured a hilltop position in Jabal Habashi that had fallen the day before, and reinforcements were sent to both provinces. Official media reported at least 50 Houthi fighters, including two field commanders, killed or wounded in the first 24 hours.
There is no option but for the Houthis to be broken and defeated in western Taiz
Yaseen Saeed Noman, Yemen's ambassador to the United Kingdom
Mr Eryani, in the statement from which the earlier quotation is taken, described a cross-border network exchanging weapons, expertise, training and technology with armed groups on both sides of the Gulf of Aden, and asked the international community for political, military, security and intelligence support for the government.
The wider stakes are in the geography. With the Strait of Hormuz closed to most commercial shipping, Bab al-Mandab has become the route that connects Asia to Europe through the Suez Canal, and the July collapse of the truce, after the Houthis received an Iranian aircraft in Sanaa, set off the attacks that led here. For the shipping and insurance markets, the question this week is not who holds a hill west of Taiz. It is whether the Houthis reach the coast opposite Djibouti with a port in their hands.