Yemen announces major military offensive to reclaim territory from Houthis

Yemen’s internationally recognised government has launched a major military campaign to recapture all territory held by the Houthi movement, marking a sharp escalation in a civil war that has reignited after years of relative calm.

Rashad al-Alimi, the head of Yemen’s presidential council, announced the offensive on Sunday, instructing all branches of the state’s armed forces to begin carrying out plans to "liberate" the country.

The declaration sets an ambitious goal for a government that has spent months on the defensive. It came on the same day Houthi forces achieved a significant tactical victory on the ground, cutting the last major supply route to the besieged city of Taiz and effectively isolating it from Aden, the government’s interim capital.

The battle for Taiz

The loss of the road running through the al-Safiya area followed days of heavy fighting. Local security and military sources confirmed that Houthi fighters took control of the route, halting all traffic and completing their encirclement of Taiz, a city of hundreds of thousands of people that has been under siege for years.

Farea Al-Muslimi, a research fellow at the Chatham House think tank, told news agency AFP that the rebels had successfully met their military objective of isolating Taiz, even without capturing the city itself. He described the government’s newly declared offensive as "meaningless" given the reality on the ground.

But government officials insist they are ready to fight back. Colonel Majed Abdullah al-Nazili, a spokesman for the government forces, said that military units executed 257 precision strikes on Houthi positions on Saturday alone, killing an estimated 700 rebel fighters.

On Sunday, the Saudi-led coalition supporting the government launched another 97 strikes using jets, drones, artillery, and snipers to target Houthi reinforcements along the fronts near Taiz and Tor al-Baha.

Escalation spreads to Saudi Arabia

The fighting has rapidly spilled beyond Yemen’s borders. Houthi military spokesman Yahya Saree said on Sunday that the group had fired ballistic missiles and drones at two facilities owned by Saudi Arabia's state oil giant Aramco—one in Riyadh and another in the eastern Khurais region.

Saree claimed the strikes caused large fires, though Saudi authorities have not yet commented on the reports. In the past, Riyadh has dismissed similar Houthi claims of cross-border strikes as fabrications.

Meanwhile, Houthi-controlled media reported that Saudi warplanes carried out retaliatory airstrikes in the northern provinces of Saada and al-Jawf, wounding at least two people.

A fragile peace shattered

The sudden escalation follows the collapse in July of a fragile UN-backed truce that had held since 2022. Since then, the conflict has steadily intensified, displacing hundreds of thousands of civilians.

The Houthis have increasingly targeted maritime routes, launching a blockade of Saudi energy exports and briefly seizing the key port of Mocha and strategic islands in the Bab al-Mandeb strait last month before government lines stabilised.

Yemen’s civil war began in 2014 when the Iran-backed Houthis seized the capital, Sanaa. A Saudi-led coalition intervened the following year to back the government, triggering a conflict that has created one of the world's deepest humanitarian crises.