More than sixty people were killed in fighting between Yemen’s Saudi-backed government forces and the Houthi movement today, according to medical and military sources cited by AFP. Three Yemeni military sources put government losses at 26 troops during several hours of fighting in the country’s south-west. Medical and military sources on the Houthi side reported 31 of their fighters killed.

In the government-held city of Taiz, a medical source said a missile strike killed six civilians travelling by bus and wounded seven others. Earlier this week AFP reported more than 120 killed in the same offensive.

The war that resumed while attention was elsewhere

Yemen’s internal war has never formally ended, but for much of the past three years the front lines were close to static and the reporting stopped almost entirely. What is happening now is a Houthi push in the south-west, in the direction of the Bab al-Mandab strait — the narrow passage between Yemen and the Horn of Africa through which shipping enters the Red Sea on the way to the Suez Canal.

That geography is why an offensive in a country most newsrooms have stopped covering has consequences well beyond it. Control of the coastline near Bab al-Mandab determines who can threaten shipping there, and shipping through the Red Sea has already been reduced by years of attacks. With the Strait of Hormuz contested at the other end of the Arabian Peninsula, the two chokepoints that carry a large share of the world’s seaborne energy are both under pressure at the same time.

Reading casualty figures from a war with no observers

The numbers in the opening paragraphs come from three categories of source: military sources on the government side, medical and military sources on the Houthi side, and a medical source in Taiz. None of them is neutral, and none can be independently verified.

Some patterns are consistent enough to be worth stating. Armed parties tend to report their own dead conservatively and the enemy’s generously. Hospital sources are usually closer to the truth on civilian casualties, because bodies and wounded arrive at a physical building, but they only see the people who reach them — which in rural fighting is a fraction. Both effects run in the same direction: published totals from Yemen are floors.

The six civilians on the bus in Taiz are, in this respect, the most reliable figure in the story and the least likely to be repeated anywhere.

What a new offensive does to a hungry country

Taiz has been among the worst-affected cities in the war, besieged and shelled for years, with water and food supply lines repeatedly cut. Yemen as a whole remains one of the largest humanitarian operations in the world, and it is chronically underfunded — a pattern we have seen repeatedly this year in appeals that close at a fraction of what was requested.

Renewed front-line fighting affects far more people than it kills. It closes roads that commercial food convoys use, displaces households into areas that are already hosting the displaced, and suspends aid movement in exactly the districts where needs assessments are hardest to carry out. The effect on hunger figures appears months later, by which time the offensive is no longer news.

What to watch

Whether the Houthi advance reaches the coastal districts near Bab al-Mandab; whether shipping insurers respond, which they will do before any government does; whether the UN issues an access statement about the south-west, which is the signal that aid movement has stopped; and whether Saudi Arabia increases its support for the government forces, which would widen the war again.

Our earlier coverage of the pressure on the other chokepoint is here: the blasts reported near Kharg Island in the Gulf.

Sources

• AFP, reporting from Dubai on fighting in south-west Yemen, 5 September 2026
• AFP, “Over 120 killed in Yemen clashes as Houthis push toward key strait”, September 2026
• Medical source in Taiz, cited by AFP, on the bus strike