Yemen's War Reignites as Government Offensive Triggers Houthi Strikes on Riyadh

Yemen's long civil war lurched back toward full-scale conflict this week after government forces launched a sweeping offensive to retake territory from Houthi rebels, triggering retaliatory missile and drone strikes on Saudi Arabia's capital and a major oil facility, and pulling in regional military powers.

The push, dubbed Operation Yemen Dawn, was announced on Sunday by Rashad al-Alimi, head of Yemen's internationally recognised Presidential Leadership Council, who said all opportunities for de-escalation had been exhausted and called on forces to fight "until the country is liberated from the grip of the Houthi terrorist militia." By Monday, pro-government units — the National Shield, Giants Brigades and Tihama Resistance — backed by Saudi air power, said they had pushed Houthi fighters out of most of the coastal areas seized in a surprise offensive last month, including the strategic port city of Mokha.

Conflicting claims on the ground

The battlefield picture remains contested. Yemen's military said its forces captured Mokha on Monday afternoon with Saudi air support, but unnamed government and military sources later told Reuters and AFP that troops had only reached the city's outskirts. The Houthis denied losing either Mokha or control of the nearby Bab al-Mandab Strait, the narrow waterway linking the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden through which a large share of Europe-Asia shipping passes. Government sources did confirm capturing the Dhubab military airfield and cutting the road linking the Dhubab district to the strait, while a Saudi-led coalition said its jets had flown round-the-clock support missions and destroyed 324 "high-value" targets since the offensive began.

The fighting has not stayed confined to Yemen's coast. The government said it had also opened operations on other fronts, including around Sanaa, the capital the Houthis have held since the war's opening months roughly twelve years ago. Houthi-run media said Saudi air strikes killed a schoolgirl and a woman in two Sanaa districts, a claim that could not be independently verified.

Strikes on Riyadh and a widening coalition

In response, the Houthis said they fired ballistic missiles and drones at sensitive sites in Riyadh and at Saudi Aramco facilities in Khurais and Yanbu. Houthi military spokesman Yahya Saree described the barrage as retaliation for "dozens of Saudi strikes on their territory," while a separate Houthi statement warned civilian airlines that Saudi airspace outside Mecca and Medina was no longer safe because it had become "a theatre of operations." Satellite imagery reviewed by BBC Verify showed smoke rising from the Aramco refinery near Riyadh and from the Khurais processing facility after the strikes. Houthi spokesman Mohammed Abdul Salam accused Saudi Arabia of committing "dozens of massacres" and said the kingdom "must bear all the consequences."

Saudi Arabia condemned the Houthi attacks and renewed calls for the UN Security Council's permanent members to back Yemen's government. Turkey and Pakistan, both Saudi allies, held an emergency meeting in Riyadh and agreed to rapidly deploy military forces to the kingdom, invoking the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement, according to a statement from Pakistan's foreign ministry. UN Secretary-General António Guterres condemned what his office called "the continued Houthi cross-border attacks" and said he was "deeply concerned by the sharp escalation in fighting."

A fragile truce finally collapses

Yemen's war began in 2014, when the Houthis ousted the government from Sanaa, and escalated sharply the following year when a Saudi-led coalition intervened to try to restore it. A rough, informal ceasefire had held for roughly four years before beginning to fray in July, when the Houthis declared a "maritime embargo" against Saudi Arabia and resumed missile and drone attacks on Saudi airports, oil sites and tankers, saying they were retaliating for a Saudi blockade of their ports and an air strike on Sanaa's airport. Last month the group launched the surprise offensive that overran Mokha, Dhubab and Perim Island along the Red Sea coast, briefly putting the Bab al-Mandab Strait under Houthi control — though the group insisted it posed no threat to international shipping and would target only Saudi-linked vessels.

That seizure still rattled global energy markets, since Saudi Arabia has leaned more heavily on Red Sea export routes in recent months after the Strait of Hormuz was effectively closed by the ongoing US-Israeli war with Iran. Any prolonged disruption to Bab al-Mandab threatens to compound an oil market already strained on multiple fronts, and traders were watching Monday's fighting closely for signs of further escalation.

For now, both sides are claiming momentum while the fog of war obscures the actual front lines. What is clear is that a conflict many diplomats had hoped was winding down is instead drawing in more outside powers, with Riyadh, Ankara and Islamabad now explicitly coordinating a military response and the Houthis signalling they are prepared to keep striking deep inside Saudi territory. Humanitarian officials have warned that a return to all-out war would be devastating for a population already suffering from one of the world's worst humanitarian crises after more than a decade of conflict.