SANA’A — The port director of al-Makha spent most of Saturday watching his operations come to a halt for the third consecutive day. Houthi missiles had struck the Red Sea city’s outskirts and main road, killing four people and wounding eight. A thousand kilometers to the northeast in Marib, the afternoon had been marked by a different kind of sound: six ballistic missiles and four drones tearing into residential neighborhoods, wounding four civilians and destroying a bakery in the Al-Sharika district. By nightfall on August 16, two more Yemeni cities had joined the growing list of places where the country’s civil war, silent for four years, had begun to speak again.
The attacks are the most visible face of a Houthi military campaign that accelerated sharply after a relative lull dating to April 2022. Earlier in August, the group struck multiple front lines across al-Jawf, al-Dhalea, and Taiz provinces, killing at least 30 government soldiers in a single round of operations. The August 16 assault on al-Makha and Marib produced more civilian casualties than any single day since the offensive resumed. The internal war, distinct from the separate Red Sea shipping campaign the Houthis have run against international vessels since 2023, appears to have entered a more aggressive phase.
“Port operations in al-Makha were already paused due to several days of strikes,” Abdulmalik al-Sharabi, the port’s director general, told Al Jazeera. The port sits at the southern end of the Red Sea coast near the Bab el-Mandeb strait, the same chokepoint where Houthi operations have been disrupting international shipping for nearly three years. President Donald Trump’s earlier threat to claim the Strait of Hormuz as US territory added a new layer of tension to the region that Yemen’s internal conflict now intersects in complicated ways. The suspension of al-Makha’s port operations compounds government-side pressures on a Red Sea coast that has depended on the port for fuel imports and humanitarian aid.
The Marib provincial government’s media office called Saturday’s strikes “violations of international humanitarian law” and demanded international condemnation, Anadolu Agency reported. Fayyad al-Numan, Yemen’s Assistant Information Minister, said the missiles had struck densely populated areas across Marib city. Tariq Saleh, a member of the Presidential Leadership Council and commander of the National Resistance Forces, condemned the attacks without announcing a specific military response.
Marib has long been one of the most contested prizes in Yemen’s civil war. The province holds the country’s largest onshore oil reserves, its most productive gas fields, and has absorbed hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people who fled Houthi advances in the northern highlands. The Houthis launched two major campaigns to take Marib city in 2021 and 2022; both failed after heavy casualties on both sides. The UN-brokered truce of April 2022 froze front lines at positions that left the city, and the province’s oil revenues, in government hands.
The truce held longer than expected, but it expired without a negotiated extension. By 2025, fighting was resuming across multiple provinces, and what began as sporadic skirmishes had by August 2026 become something more systematic. The Houthis, formally known as Ansar Allah, control Sanaa and most of the northern highlands. Iran backs them, a relationship that deepened markedly after the group began its Red Sea campaign in solidarity with the Palestinian people. The Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon and the Houthi shipping campaign are separate conflicts, but their financial and logistical pathways share an Iranian patron.
Whether Tehran is directing the timing of August’s escalation inside Yemen or simply enabling it is not established from the available military and diplomatic signals. What is clear is that the Yemeni government’s declared military effort, with its forces claiming 181 operations against Houthi positions and dozens of fighters killed or wounded, has not stopped the missiles from reaching Marib and al-Makha.
Yemen’s population remains one of the world’s most severe humanitarian crises. More than 70 percent of the country requires some form of humanitarian assistance. The economy has effectively collapsed; the World Food Programme has documented famine-level conditions across multiple governorates. Into that landscape, a resumption of full-scale fighting in Marib and al-Makha sends not only missiles and drones but the near-certain effect of displacing tens of thousands more civilians from already fragile positions.
What the Houthis are attempting to achieve militarily with this escalation is not yet public. A renewed push for Marib city would be the most ambitious reading of the available signals. Continued pressure designed to stretch government defensive capacity thin across multiple provinces is the more cautious interpretation. The front lines had not visibly moved by Saturday evening, but the people at Marib’s Al-Sharika bakery and at the port of al-Makha were already living with the consequence of whatever the Houthis have decided this offensive is for.
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