Yemenis fear return to war as Houthi attacks shatter fragile 2022 truce

Anwar's three-year-old daughter has never known war. She was born after Yemen's fragile ceasefire took hold in 2022, after years of civil conflict that killed tens of thousands and displaced millions. When explosions rocked the port city of Mokha last week, she ran to her father asking what the noise was. He told her it was fireworks from a wedding. He could not bring himself to tell her the truth: that the Houthi rebels had just attacked the port, that the relative calm of the past four years might be ending, that the cycles of fear and displacement that defined her country's recent history might be about to begin again.

Yemen's civil war, stretching back more than a decade, had reduced the nation to rubble and desperation. The 2022 truce between the Iran-backed Houthi rebels and the Saudi-backed government offered the first real respite—a chance for people to rebuild, to breathe, to imagine a future beyond survival. But last month, that fragile peace fractured. The Houthis welcomed an Iranian plane into the capital of Sanaa, then announced a maritime blockade of Saudi Arabia, striking tankers in the Red Sea and ramping up attacks on government-held territory. The government retaliated. Explosions returned to places that had begun to feel safe again.

In Mokha, where Anwar had fled with his family seeking refuge from earlier rounds of fighting, the port attack shattered the illusion of safety. "I do not want our lives to be haunted by constant panic caused by Houthi terror," he told journalists. "Mokha used to be a safe city and a haven for many Yemenis." His fear was not for himself alone. "The hardest part is not fearing for my own safety, but fearing for my children and family." Another Mokha resident, Najem Hammoud al-Wahbani, captured the suffocating reality of the moment: "Everyone lives in fear. Every day, Houthi missiles and drones fly overhead. We hear shelling in the distance, but we fear that, tomorrow, it could be right here."

The violence has already claimed lives. Earlier this month, Houthi attacks killed 58 government troops, mostly in Marib province, which sits atop Yemen's oil reserves. Two civilians died in shelling on residential areas and displacement camps in the same province. These numbers matter less as statistics than as proof that the killing has resumed, that the machinery of war is grinding back to life.

Marib has become the epicenter of this renewed conflict. The province is divided between government and Houthi control, making it a natural flashpoint. But Marib carries a particular weight in Yemen's humanitarian catastrophe: it hosts 60 percent of all internally displaced people in the country, according to the International Organization for Migration. These are people already uprooted once, twice, sometimes more. Ali Munif, 46, has lived in a displacement camp on the outskirts of Marib city since 2021, when rebels overran his village. When asked what would happen if war returned to Marib, his question hung in the air: "Where would I flee?"

Mohammed Ali, displaced from Hodeida to al-Khokha north of Mokha, was contemplating moving his family further east to Aden. He runs a construction business in Khokha. "If fighting reaches here, it could destroy everything, including my future and my children's future," he said. The calculus of survival in Yemen has become a grim arithmetic: where to go, what to abandon, how much loss a family can absorb.

A mother living near one of the military camps hit in the recent attacks described the moment the strikes landed. The explosions shook windows and doors like an earthquake. "It brought back the fear, anxiety, and despair we experienced at the height of war," she said, speaking on condition of anonymity for her own safety. The strikes had stolen her sleep. "We now live with the constant thought that we could become a target at any moment." This is what the return of war looks like not in headlines but in the body—in sleeplessness, in the startle reflex, in the knowledge that safety is provisional and can be revoked without warning.

Yemen stands at a threshold. The 2022 truce held for four years, long enough for a generation of children to grow up without knowing bombardment, long enough for some infrastructure to be repaired, long enough for people to begin imagining futures. Now, with Iranian support emboldening the Houthis and tit-for-tat escalations accelerating, that window appears to be closing. The question is no longer whether war will return, but how quickly, and whether the millions already displaced, already traumatized, already living on the edge of famine, can survive another cycle of it.