Houthi strikes on Marib kill civilians as Yemen escalates toward full-scale war

On Saturday morning, the Iranian-backed Houthis sent four ballistic missiles and four drones into Marib, Yemen's government-held city that has become a refuge for the country's most vulnerable people. The strikes landed in residential neighborhoods, injuring several civilians and destroying homes, vehicles, and property. Before the day ended, a fifth missile came down on the city, wounding at least one more person. By Sunday morning, a sixth had followed.

Marib has become something like a pressure cooker. More than two million internally displaced Yemenis live there—roughly forty percent of all the people forced from their homes across the entire country during years of war. They are packed into a city that was already struggling to absorb them. When missiles fall on residential areas, they do not fall on empty ground.

Yemen's Ministry of Information called the strikes an "ongoing assault" and used the word escalation deliberately. The attacks were not isolated incidents but part of a pattern that has accelerated sharply since early August. In the first days of that month, Houthi missiles and drones struck military camps in Marib and Hadramout, killing at least thirty government soldiers in what officials described as the deadliest single episode in years. Days later, more Houthi missiles killed at least two civilians in Marib and wounded fourteen others. A separate strike on the port city of al-Makha killed seven people.

The fighting has spread across multiple fronts. Government forces claimed that drone strikes they conducted killed three Houthi fighters, including field commanders, along the Maqbanah front west of Taiz. Another strike destroyed a Houthi military vehicle in Jabal al-Zuhayb, killing several more fighters. The rhythm of attack and counterattack has quickened. Video footage verified by Al Jazeera documented the destruction left behind in Marib after Saturday's strikes—the physical evidence of what happens when missiles reach civilian ground.

What makes this moment significant is not just the intensity of the fighting but what it signals about the future. Hans Grundberg, the United Nations Special Envoy for Yemen, warned the Security Council on Thursday that the country now faces its highest risk of returning to full-scale war since a UN-brokered truce took hold in April 2022. That truce, fragile as it was, had held for more than four years. It had created a space—narrow and precarious, but real—where some semblance of normal life could resume. Grundberg's warning suggests that space is closing. The Houthis, who control much of Yemen's north including the capital Sanaa, have the backing of Iran and the capacity to sustain this level of strikes. The government has shown it can strike back. Neither side appears ready to step away from the escalation.

For the two million people sheltering in Marib, the implications are immediate and concrete. They fled here to escape fighting elsewhere. Now the fighting has followed them. The Ministry of Information's language—describing threats to "displaced persons' camps" alongside residential neighborhoods—acknowledges what is at stake: not just property or military positions, but the lives of people who have already lost everything once.