Yemen’s Houthis said on Friday (September 18, 2026) that Saudi Arabia had launched 26 strikes against areas under their control in the past 24 hours, as the pro-Iran group and Yemen’s Riyadh-backed government clash in the country’s revived civil war.

The group said that the number of Saudi strikes on its positions had reached 300 over the last week, saying they targeted areas across Houthi-held Yemen.

The war, which began in 2014 with the Houthi capture of the capital Sanaa, had been largely frozen since 2022 but erupted back into life in July.

Saudi Arabia has, since 2015, led a coalition backing the internationally recognised government. Its intervention escalated the war, which has triggered one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises in the impoverished country.

This month, the Houthis, who already held most of Yemen’s populated areas, launched a lightning offensive to take over the country’s entire Red Sea coast, giving them control over the vital Bab al-Mandab strait.

The group, whose heartland is among the Zaidi Shia Muslims of northern Yemen, has declared a maritime blockade of Saudi Arabia, which had used to bypass the Strait of Hormuz, itself closed by the West Asia war, for its oil exports.

Figures from maritime tracking firm Kpler showed that Saudi exports via the Bab al-Mandab Strait had dropped since July, although five loaded ships had passed through in the last week.

The Houthis insist that navigation of the strait is open and free except for Saudi vessels.

On Friday (September 18), the UN said that the renewed fighting had displaced more than 112,000 people while nearly 3,000 others had fled across the sea to Djibouti, heaping further misery on an already struggling population.

In 2025, the UN warned that 17 million people in Yemen were struggling to eat and a further million faced extreme hunger.

More than 10 civilians, including a 4-year-old child, were injured in Saudi Arabia on Thursday (August 6, 2026) after a series of attacks by Yemen’s Houthi rebels, according to the Saudi military.

West Asia LIVE: Houthi missile attacks kill 58 Saudi-backed Yemeni government forces, says source

The attacks, which took place in the southern region of Najran, near the Yemeni border, came hours after the Iran-backed rebels claimed responsibility for another series of strikes in central and eastern Yemen that killed at least 30 government troops and wounded at least 50 others.

A Houthi leader said Saudi-backed troops were targeted in the attacks and that “hundreds” were either killed or injured. The assaults hit camps for forces of the internationally recognised government in the provinces of Marib and Hadramout, the Yemeni officials said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to speak to the media.

Turki al-Malki, a spokesman for the Saudi military, said the later attack wounded seven Saudi nationals, one Yemeni, two Egyptians and one Pakistani expat. The Houthis did not release any statement.

“The terrorist Houthi militia carried out these terrorist attacks using indiscriminate shelling against civilian objects, which is a flagrant violation of the Customary International Humanitarian Law through deliberate targeting of civilians and civilian objects,” Mr. al-Malki said in a post on X.

The back-to-back attacks mark the latest major escalation since a de facto truce in Yemen in April 2022 that halted major fighting between the Houthis and a Saudi-led coalition, which backs the internationally recognised government.

Yemen’s army reported publicly only that the Houthi attacks on its camps had left dead and wounded among its troops, but it didn’t give a death toll.

Houthi Brig. Gen. Yahya Saree said the attacks on camps in Marib and Hadramout provinces were carried out with ballistic missiles and drones and that they were in response to a build-up of Saudi-backed forces in eastern Yemen.

The strikes killed and injured “hundreds of Saudi enemy mercenaries” and destroyed and burned camps, depots, military vehicles and weapons, the Houthi leader said.

“We call upon all our people to remain vigilant and confront any Saudi aggression, and to strike Saudi troop concentrations wherever they may be,” Houthi leader Saree said in his address.

The U.S. mission to Yemen expressed condolences to the families of the killed Yemeni soldiers in Hadramout and Marib, adding in a statement on X that the attacks by the Houthis “represent yet another example of their terrorism against the Yemeni people.”

Yemen has been embroiled in a civil war since 2014, when the Houthis seized the capital of Sanaa, forcing the internationally recognised government into exile in Saudi Arabia.

A Saudi-led coalition intervened months later and has been battling the rebels since 2015 to try to restore the internationally recognised government to power. However, the war has turned into a stalemated proxy conflict with neither side winning.

The Houthis claim that their recent escalation, including a naval blockade against Saudi Arabia in the Red Sea and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, is in response to the Kingdom’s air and sea blockade on Yemen since 2015.