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The armed forces of Yemen’s internationally recognised government have accused the Houthis of launching another round of ballistic missile attacks on the Red Sea port city of al-Makha and on residential areas in the central city of Marib.
Yemeni forces did not state whether the attacks on Monday caused any casualties.
The attacks came a day after Houthi missiles killed at least seven people and wounded 30 others in al-Makha, which is also known as Mocha. The strikes caused extensive damage at the city’s port area.
Elsewhere in Yemen on Monday, a Houthi drone strike killed two Yemeni government soldiers and wounded seven others in the south-central province of Shabwa, according to local media reports.
Yemeni forces, in a series of posts on X, said they targeted Houthi rebels and their sites in eastern al-Jawf province, northwestern Saada province and the al-Tibas area of central Marib province.
The tit-for-tat attacks are the deadliest in years in Yemen’s civil war and mark a major escalation in the conflict, which has been reignited by the war launched by the United States and Israel against Iran on February 28.
The Iran-backed Houthis captured Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, in September 2014, with a Saudi-led coalition intervening in March 2015 on the side of the government.
The conflict, which has killed hundreds of thousands of people, deteriorated into a deadlock, and the warring parties reached a truce in April 2022 that ended major fighting across the country.
The Saudi-led coalition in turn has struck Houthi-controlled Hodeidah and Kamaran, Yemen’s largest island in the Red Sea. It has also reinforced Yemeni troops along the front lines in Yemen to launch a ground offensive on Houthis.
Meanwhile, the United Nations has called for restraint.
“Yemen today faces a greater risk of renewed large-scale conflict than at any point since the UN-brokered truce of April 2022,” UN envoy Hans Grundberg warned on Friday.
The escalation, he said, risks “jeopardising the gains of the 2022 truce … while also drawing the country into a broader regional confrontation, with devastating consequences for its people”.
But the violence reignited on July 13 with a Saudi air strike on the runway of Sanaa airport, preventing the landing of an Iranian flight carrying a high-ranking Houthi delegation.
Following the strike, the Houthis attacked the Abha airport in southwestern Saudi Arabia and announced a blockade on Saudi shipping in the Red Sea. They have also attacked Saudi vessels as well as oil facilities in the kingdom, adding further disruption to the global economy.