Houthi attacks on Yemen’s strategic Marib province killed at least 10 people on Friday, according to a minister and military source, as the Iran-aligned rebels escalated strikes on the oil-rich region a day after one of their deadliest assaults in years.
A Yemeni military source told AFP that the latest Houthi attacks killed eight members of government forces and wounded 12 others. Separately, the health minister for the Saudi-backed government said the rebels shelled residential areas and displacement camps in Marib city, killing at least two civilians and wounding 14. The Houthis said they had targeted a government military camp in the province, framing the assault as retaliation against a Saudi-backed troop build-up.
The violence follows one of the deadliest escalations in months: at least 58 government troops were killed in rebel missile and drone attacks on Marib and Hadramawt provinces on Thursday, according to government sources. A source close to the Saudi military told AFP that the Saudi-led coalition, which has backed the Yemeni government since 2015, would not stand “idly by” as the Houthis intensify attacks, describing Marib as a “red line.”
The fighting marks a serious unravelling of the 2022 UN-brokered truce between the Houthis and the Saudi-supported government, which had largely held for four years before collapsing last month. UN Special Envoy for Yemen Hans Grundberg said the country “today faces a greater risk of renewed large-scale conflict than at any point” since the 2022 truce, citing the Marib and Hadramawt attacks alongside renewed Houthi strikes on commercial shipping in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. He urged all parties to exercise maximum restraint and return to UN-led negotiations.
Yemen became the latest front drawn into the wider US-Iran conflict last month, after the Houthis welcomed an Iranian plane directly into Sanaa, triggering a series of tit-for-tat attacks and a subsequent Houthi-declared blockade of Saudi Arabia.