Yemen's Four-Year Truce Just Broke. The Houthis Are Fighting for the Port That Decides Who Uses the Red Sea.

Yemen's 2022 truce, brokered by the UN, was not a peace deal — it was a ceasefire that both sides had, unusually for this conflict, mostly observed for four years even after its formal terms lapsed. That held until July 2026, when Saudi airstrikes targeted Sanaa's airport specifically to stop an Iranian flight believed to be carrying Houthi delegates and suspected IRGC personnel from landing — an act the Houthis treated as a rupture significant enough to abandon restraint. Attacks resumed through August across Marib, Taiz, Hodeidah and al-Dhale governorates: missiles, drones and ground skirmishes building toward the offensive that began early on 4 September. That day's assault targeted the road linking Taiz city — Yemen's third-largest — to the government-held Red Sea port of al-Makha, fighting across the Maqbanah mountains, Jabal Habashi district, and the al-Ma'afer front. Analyst Mohammad al-Basha, of the Basha Report, framed the Houthi objective directly: 'The Houthis feel that if they capture Bab al-Mandab or Mokha port, they will be in a better position to negotiate with the government and the Saudis.' AFP's casualty count over the first two days reached 129 — a toll Al Jazeera's own reporting separately corroborated with government and Houthi-side medical-source figures (24 government troops near the west coast, at least 42 Houthi fighters). A Houthi ballistic missile strike on a crowded road near Mokha on 5 September killed at least four civilians and wounded nine more, per local medical sources. UN OCHA's displacement figure — nearly 1,800 families in under 48 hours — came from camps in Maqbanah and Jabal Habashi emptying under shelling, with aid stocks described as 'severely depleted.'

The trigger sequence is fairly direct in the reporting: Saudi Arabia's July airstrikes on Sanaa airport, aimed at a specific Iranian flight rather than at Houthi positions generally, gave the Houthis a discrete grievance to point to in abandoning a truce that had otherwise held through years of separate tension (the Gaza war, the Red Sea shipping crisis, the Israel-Iran conflict) without breaking. But the target the Houthis chose — the Taiz-to-Mokha corridor and the hills overlooking Bab al-Mandeb — is not incidental to that trigger; it is a long-standing strategic objective independent of it. Al-Basha's analysis frames the logic plainly: physical control of the strait or the port converts into negotiating leverage the Houthis do not currently have in full, layered on top of the leverage they already project over Red Sea shipping from the north. Al Jazeera's own correspondent reporting from the ground described both sides as 'scrabbling to gain territory and gain control not just on land, but at sea' — language that treats this as a leverage-building operation, not merely retaliation for the July strikes. Likely rather than confirmed, because no Houthi official statement in the cited reporting states the port-and-strait objective as explicit strategy — that reading comes from analyst assessment and the pattern of where the fighting is actually concentrated, not a stated Houthi position.

The strategic logic favors the Houthis if the offensive succeeds on its own terms: al-Basha's assessment is that capturing Bab al-Mandeb-adjacent territory or the port itself would materially improve their negotiating position, not just symbolically but by giving them physical chokepoint control they do not currently hold over this specific stretch of coast. That would compound rather than duplicate the leverage they already have from operations against shipping further north in the Red Sea — a genuinely new card, not the same one played twice. But the government's own claims — recapturing al-Khazan and al-Makahna hills in Jabal Habashi, per its Friday announcement — mean the offensive has not yet delivered the outcome that would make this leverage real. Government reinforcements (National Shield Forces, Giant's Brigades) are actively contesting the ground. Uncertain, because the fighting described in the most recent reporting (5 September) is still active and contested on both sides, and no source in this analysis's citations describes a settled outcome either way.

The displacement figures here are not estimates from either combatant but UN OCHA's own count: nearly 1,800 families fleeing in under 48 hours, on top of the 'hundreds of families' Al Jazeera separately documented fleeing al-Rahabah camp alone. Displaced resident Abdullah Saeed's account — 'we have fled for the second time, but there are also families who fled for the first time' — captures a population being displaced repeatedly by a conflict that had, until July, been mostly frozen. Aid infrastructure is reported as 'severely depleted' even before this specific wave, meaning the families now moving are arriving into camps and host communities with fewer resources than the last time fighting forced people to move. The 5 September missile strike near Mokha killed civilians on what was reported as an ordinary crowded road, not a military target — a reminder that even in an offensive framed around territorial and strategic objectives, the confirmed, immediate casualties are civilians going about ordinary movement. This is rated confirmed rather than likely because it rests on directly reported casualty and displacement figures from UN and news-agency sources, not on an inference about motive or strategy.