Yemen’s army says targets Houthis in hundreds of strikes, killing 700

The Yemeni army says it has carried out hundreds of strikes on the capital, Sanaa, and other areas held by the Iran-backed Houthis, as the battle for control of the country’s most populated regions intensifies.

Colonel Majed Abdullah al-Nazili, the spokesman for Yemen’s internationally recognised government forces, said on Saturday that the military “executed 257 precision targeting operations” against Houthi sites, movements, and military capabilities.

The army used “warplanes, drones, artillery, missiles, and rocket launchers”, he added in a post on X.

Al-Nazili said initial estimates indicate the operations killed at least 700 Houthi rebels and destroyed “strategic and high-value military targets”, including 170 combat vehicles and heavy equipment.

The army spokesman did not mention any casualties among government forces.

The strikes “had a direct impact on the [Houthi] militia’s combat capability and limited its ability to continue its attacks against civilians in their homes and villages”, he said.

Saturday’s operations targeted Sanaa, Midi, Baqim, and the front lines in al-Jawf, Marib, al-Bayda, and Lahij, with the heaviest operational efforts concentrated around Taiz, al-Nazili added.

On Friday, al-Nazili said Yemen’s government forces had carried out nearly 500 military operations, killing or wounding 1,540 Houthi rebels in 24 hours.

Taiz focal point of clashes

The government-held city of Taiz has become a focal point of the renewed fighting.

Al Jazeera’s Maha Ali, reporting from Taiz on Saturday, said the region is seeing continued escalation and intense fighting across several fronts around the city, with some of the fiercest fighting happening on its western outskirts.

The Houthis have used an exceptionally heavy volume of fire during the assault, she noted, adding that the sound of continuing artillery fire, particularly from the Houthi side targeting western areas, could still be heard.

Residents are appealing for evacuation as the shelling continues, Ali reported, adding that there have been civilian casualties in the fighting, including from a shell that hit a residential area in Dhubab, killing a baby who died from shrapnel injuries.

On the Samaa front, she said, the Houthis made advances on Friday in the mountainous area, and fierce clashes are continuing there between government forces and the rebels. Several field sources told Ali that large numbers of residents have left Samaa, something, she said, that had not happened on this scale in more than a decade.

Following those clashes, Yemeni government forces took control of the Samaa fort, southeast of the city of Taiz, after heavy fighting, the government-run Saba news agency reported.

A military source told Saba that the armed forces, backed by local popular resistance fighters from the Samaa district, secured the fort after “violent battles”, leaving dozens of Houthi fighters killed or wounded while others fled.

Key border crossing closed

On Saturday, the army’s media official Ammar al-Sami’i told Al Jazeera that the government had closed the al-Houban crossing in Taiz.

The crossing had previously been closed for nine years and was later reopened to civilians in 2024 for “humanitarian reasons”, Sami’i said, as the road is one of Yemen’s most important connections between territory held by the opposing sides. It connects Houthi-held al-Houban to government-held Taiz city.

Sami’i said security reasons are behind the closure, following an attempt by the Houthis to infiltrate Taiz via the road, attacks in the vicinity and a general military build-up.

A fragile truce struck between the government and the Houthis in 2022 collapsed in July this year, and fighting in Yemen has escalated significantly since then.

In mid-September, the Houthis swept across parts of western Yemen, seizing the port city of Mocha and key strategic islands in the Bab al-Mandeb strait.

Since then, anti-Houthi forces have largely stabilised the front lines.

Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced since the fighting restarted.

Yemen has been embroiled in civil war since the Houthis seized the capital of Sanaa in 2014, forcing the internationally recognised government to retreat to Aden.