There’s no offensive on Sana’a yet. The government has announced this twice, most strongly with the launch of what it called ‘Dawn of Yemen’, but this was overly ambitious. In reality, it has lost Yemen’s western coast. It sent the Southern Giants Brigades, an allied force, to recapture Dhu Bab near Bab al-Mandab. Control of Bab al-Mandab will likely go back and forth until the battle for Taiz is settled. It has also lost most of Taiz governorate, and Taiz city is under Houthi siege. The Houthis have cut supply lines from Aden to Taiz and the western coast. They are now dangerously close to Aden, the government’s temporary capital. On 15 October, they struck the government’s headquarters, Maashiq Palace, and Aden airport with several missiles.

If the government loses Aden, war dynamics could flip. Despite 12 years of war, Yemen has kept a high level of political plurality in the areas controlled by the internationally recognised government. Large parts of the country, including some eastern and southern governorates, remain hostile to the Houthis and will resist their rule. But if the government falls, the Houthis will try to isolate these governorates one by one and negotiate separate arrangements with each.

This would put one of the most ideologically driven non-state armed groups, with military capabilities on a par with those of a state, in control of one of the most strategic locations in the Middle East. Yemen overlooks the Arabian Sea, Bab al-Mandab, the Horn of Africa and the Red Sea, and sits amid Gulf states whose models and priorities for themselves and the region are completely different from those of the Houthis.

It’s difficult to deter a group that has little to lose when everyone around it has a lot to lose. This leaves regional and global powers alike at a loss for options.

Regional powers, mainly the Arab Gulf states, have a lot to lose. Over the past year, Iran has systematically targeted them, and Saudi Arabia now faces daily missile attacks that are overwhelming its air defences. They rely on free navigation to ship their oil and liquefied gas, import goods and attract investment and business. For the region, the struggle over Red Sea shipping routes combines economic and security risks that could quickly spiral beyond containment. It is already destabilising the regional order.

Further down the line, Saudi Arabia also risks a challenge to its territorial integrity. Houthi control of Yemen could embolden the group to reject the 2000 Saudi-Yemen border agreement and provoke Saudi Arabia further by laying claim to Asir, Jizan and Najran, Saudi provinces it considers Yemeni territory.

The region has been scrambling to deal with a compound security problem since the genocide in Gaza began, as the USA has retreated from its role as security guarantor for regional monarchies and becomes less predictable. Regional alignments have accelerated and states have announced multilateral security and defence pacts, but these are too new to support direct military engagement. Individual countries in these pacts also risk popular backlash if they send troops.

Iran also knew that if it kept Hormuz closed for too long, states would find alternatives and it would lose its leverage. By mobilising the Houthis on Bab al-Mandab, it gained a hold on a second shipping chokepoint. This doubled the leverage of the Houthis and Iran and eased the pressure Iran has faced since Israel and the USA went to war with it in February.

We saw an exodus when the fighting in the western mountains reached the coast. The day the port town of Al-Makha fell, tens of thousands of people fled. Those who couldn’t find a car walked with their children and nothing else. Families who had already been displaced took in newly displaced ones. Several women gave birth while fleeing.

Taiz is very densely populated. People live across its mountains and valleys, in terraces and small villages, and the city is a large metropolitan area. Millions of people are affected, and close to a million are besieged without cooking gas, food, medicine, petrol and other basic supplies, meaning a famine may unfold in a matter of weeks. A very fragile health sector is dealing with huge numbers of injured people every day.

The Houthis are blocking humanitarian aid, and geography makes some areas very hard to reach. Meanwhile, aid to Yemen has been drastically cut over the past three years, so the ability to respond quickly is severely lacking. We are facing a humanitarian crisis on a scale we haven’t seen within such a short period since the war began in 2015.

Local community initiatives are usually the first responders. They organise food campaigns and volunteers step up. Civil society also plays an important role in raising awareness of what is happening and of humanitarian need, and in documentation and journalistic reporting.

But extreme repression has strangled civil society in recent years. Activists have faced assassinations and violence. Civil society remains resilient, but it has taken many blows during the war.

Today it faces its most serious risk yet. The Houthis immediately target activists and journalists when new territory falls under their control, and we have received reports of scores of detentions. In areas they already control, the Houthis have detained anyone suspected of ties to an international organisation, accusing them of espionage. Many of those detained are linked to United Nations (UN) aid agencies or local humanitarian organisations. Many people who have fled to government areas could face an imminent threat if protection mechanisms are not swiftly put in place.

Parties come to negotiate a peace settlement in two situations. The first is when the balance of power creates a stalemate that makes them realise their only way out is to sit down with the other side and find a reasonable power-sharing arrangement. The second is when one side changes its nature and becomes less militaristic over time. Neither applies today. As long as the Houthis have the upper hand, they have no reason to negotiate power-sharing. Over the years, they have received tacit recognition from regional powers, and even from the USA, which in 2025 announced a deal with them to halt attacks on US maritime assets. They have now built major momentum through military action on multiple fronts and will probably want to capitalise on it for as long as it lasts.

The Houthis have come to the table three times, but never to negotiate a peace settlement: in 2018 for the UN-brokered Stockholm Agreement, after the battle of Marib in 2021 and 2022, and in talks with Saudi Arabia in 2022 and 2023. They have invested heavily in shifting the balance of power in their favour, so there’s no quick way to meaningfully bring them to the negotiating table. In fact, the belief that Yemen’s conflict could be resolved quickly is a big part of why the war has weighed so heavily on Yemenis. It’s also why the world now faces a problem it lacks a strategy to address.

For years, countries have felt they could disengage whenever Yemen became too complicated. Instead, Yemen needs a collaborative, multilateral strategy that resists reducing the conflict to a hard security problem. The conflict is underpinned by deep-rooted economic, governance and social problems, as well as Yemen’s marginalisation in the region. No solution can be sustained unless it addresses these in the medium to long term.