Taiz hardest hit with nearly 50,000 displaced as Houthi advance along Red Sea coast raises fears of a return to full-scale civil war and threatens one of the world’s most important shipping routes

ADEN/SANAA/GENEVA — Yemen is confronting another rapidly escalating humanitarian emergency as renewed fighting forces tens of thousands of civilians from their homes, overwhelms already fragile aid networks and raises fears that the country could slide back into the kind of full-scale war that devastated it for much of the past decade.

The International Organization for Migration said on September 12 that more than 76,000 people have been displaced since July, with the number rising dramatically as fighting spreads across Yemen’s western coast and southern Taiz frontlines. Only days earlier, IOM had put the figure at about 46,000, illustrating how quickly the latest wave of displacement is unfolding.

The sharp increase has come amid a major offensive by the Iran-aligned Houthi movement against forces supporting Yemen’s internationally recognized government. The fighting has intensified around Taiz and along the Red Sea coast, where control of territory is changing rapidly and civilians are fleeing communities close to active battle zones.

According to IOM, Taiz Governorate is by far the worst affected, with approximately 8,300 households — nearly 50,000 people — displaced from areas including Jabal Habashi, Al-Ma’afer, Maqbanah, Mawza and Al-Wazi’iyah.

Another 2,819 households, or almost 17,000 people, have been displaced in Lahj, particularly around Al-Mudharibah district. In Al Hodeidah, more than 1,374 households — over 8,100 people — have fled, including families from the coastal districts of Hays and Al-Khawkhah. Aden has received or recorded another 191 displaced households, representing more than 1,100 people.

The latest emergency numbers represent a dramatic acceleration beyond IOM’s earlier weekly tracking. Between August 30 and September 5 alone, the organization recorded 2,250 newly displaced households, equivalent to approximately 13,500 people, with 1,936 of those households moving within or into Taiz.

IOM cautions that displacement statistics in fast-moving conflict zones are constantly being updated. Its emergency tracking relies on rapidly collected information from multiple sources before longer-term verification, meaning totals can rise sharply as previously inaccessible communities are reached and new movements are confirmed.

For many Yemeni families, this is not their first displacement.

IOM Director General Amy Pope said some families have now been forced from their homes for the second or third time during the conflict. Many have exhausted their savings, lost their livelihoods and fled with little more than the belongings they could carry.

Communications failures and dangerous roads are making the situation even more difficult. IOM says fighting has disrupted telephone and communications networks in affected areas while some roads are becoming inaccessible, making it harder both to assess humanitarian needs and to deliver assistance.

IOM teams are distributing emergency shelter materials, hygiene kits and other essential supplies, but the organization says requirements are increasing faster than aid agencies can respond. It has called for unrestricted humanitarian access, protection for civilians and aid workers, and urgent international financial support.

The human consequences are already visible in Aden and other areas receiving displaced families.

Associated Press journalists visiting displaced Yemenis in Aden described overcrowded homes where residents were sheltering relatives and strangers who had escaped the fighting. Families had arrived with only a handful of possessions, while children and elderly people rested on thin mattresses in packed rooms after chaotic journeys away from frontline areas.

Some civilians told AP they fled amid gunfire and confusion, not knowing which roads remained safe or where they would eventually find shelter. Their accounts underscore a central feature of the latest emergency: large numbers of families are moving not toward organized camps but toward relatives, host communities and cities already struggling with poverty, weak infrastructure and shortages.

The displacement crisis has accelerated as the Houthis have made their most significant territorial gains in years.

On September 10, Houthi forces took control of Mokha, the strategically important Red Sea port in Taiz Governorate, according to Houthi officials and officials aligned with Yemen’s internationally recognized government.

Mokha lies roughly 80 kilometers, or 50 miles, from the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, one of the world’s most important maritime chokepoints connecting the Red Sea with the Gulf of Aden and the wider Indian Ocean. Roughly 12 percent of global trade normally passes through the waterway, according to figures cited by AP.

The Houthis also advanced southward toward the strait and reached Perim Island, situated inside Bab el-Mandeb, according to Reuters. Their expanding presence has heightened international concern that conflict inside Yemen could again have consequences far beyond the country’s borders.

The strategic significance is particularly acute because instability elsewhere in the Middle East has already disrupted energy and commercial shipping. Reuters estimates that restrictions at Bab el-Mandeb could affect a route associated with roughly 7 percent of global petroleum flows and around 12 percent of world trade.

For Yemen’s civilians, however, the immediate concern is survival rather than geopolitics.

The country entered the latest fighting already facing one of the world’s most severe humanitarian emergencies after more than a decade of conflict, economic collapse, disease outbreaks, climate shocks and the erosion of public services.

The World Health Organization estimates that 23.1 million people in Yemen will require humanitarian assistance in 2026, while 10.5 million are being prioritized for assistance. Only about 60 percent of health facilities remain fully functional, according to WHO, leaving millions of people without dependable access to treatment.

Disease outbreaks remain another serious danger. Yemen continues to struggle with cholera, malaria, dengue and vaccine-preventable illnesses at the same time that damaged infrastructure, shortages of medicines and limited funding weaken the health system’s ability to respond.

Children face particularly severe risks.

UNICEF says approximately 19.7 million Yemenis require humanitarian assistance, including about 15 million women and children. Around 500,000 children are projected to suffer severe wasting in 2026, while more than 7 million children face heightened protection risks and approximately 4.5 million remain out of school.

Food insecurity is also worsening.

The World Food Programme reported in June that about 5 million people in areas controlled by Yemen’s internationally recognized government were already experiencing Crisis-level or worse food insecurity, including approximately 1.4 million people classified at Emergency level.

For the June-to-September lean season, WFP and partners projected that the figure could rise to 5.4 million people — around 51 percent of the population in government-controlled areas.

FAO and WFP have consequently listed Yemen alongside Sudan, South Sudan and the Palestinian territories among the world’s most critical hunger hotspots for the June-to-November 2026 period.

The new displacement threatens to make every one of those problems worse.

Families fleeing fighting need immediate shelter, food, clean water, sanitation, healthcare and protection. Host communities receiving them are frequently poor themselves, and many local services were overstretched even before the latest escalation.

The renewed conflict also threatens to unravel the relative calm Yemen had experienced since a United Nations-brokered truce in 2022.

The Houthis seized the capital, Sanaa, and large areas of northern Yemen in 2014. Saudi Arabia and regional allies intervened militarily the following year in support of Yemen’s internationally recognized government. Years of warfare followed, creating massive displacement, destroying infrastructure and pushing millions toward hunger.

Although the formal 2022 truce eventually expired, large-scale fighting remained substantially lower for several years.

That period of relative calm is now under serious threat.

After the Houthis seized Mokha, U.N. Special Envoy for Yemen Hans Grundberg warned that the renewed warfare had effectively brought an end to more than four years of comparative calm and could open a more dangerous phase of the conflict with consequences extending beyond Yemen.

The escalation has also renewed tensions with Saudi Arabia. The Houthis have carried out missile and drone attacks against Saudi targets as fighting intensifies, while Saudi-backed Yemeni forces have sought to halt the Houthi advance. The developments are increasingly intertwined with the wider confrontation involving Iran, the United States and regional states.

For humanitarian organizations, however, the priority is preventing military escalation from becoming another mass civilian catastrophe.

IOM has appealed to all parties to protect civilians, humanitarian personnel, relief supplies, vehicles and facilities and to allow safe, sustained access to communities trapped or displaced by the fighting.

The agency is also warning that the 76,000 figure may not represent the final scale of the crisis. With population movements continuing, communications disrupted and some frontline communities difficult to reach, the number of displaced people could increase further as additional information becomes available.

Yemen therefore faces a dangerous convergence: renewed territorial warfare, growing displacement, severe hunger, a weakened health system and an international humanitarian response already constrained by funding shortages.

After more than a decade of conflict, many Yemeni families have few resources left with which to absorb another emergency.

The latest displacement figures are consequently more than another statistic from a long-running war. They are an indication that a country which never fully emerged from its previous humanitarian catastrophe may once again be moving toward a far more destructive phase — unless the fighting is contained and humanitarian assistance reaches civilians quickly.