Houthi missile and drone barrage strikes residential districts of Marib
Yemen Herald News 
Residents of Marib were woken late on Saturday by a succession of heavy explosions as the Houthi movement fired a salvo of ballistic missiles and armed drones into the city, striking neighbourhoods that shelter tens of thousands of families already displaced by more than a decade of war. The local authority in Marib said four ballistic missiles and four drones were launched at residential districts, damaging homes, vehicles and private property and wounding a number of civilians. A fifth missile that landed later in the day injured one more person, and a sixth was fired towards the city overnight, according to the same account.
Emergency crews reached the impact sites within minutes to search the rubble and assess the damage, although the government had not released a consolidated casualty figure by the time this report was compiled. Residents described the blasts as among the most powerful to strike the city in recent weeks, with debris scattered across streets and windows blown out several blocks from the points of impact. Marib’s civil authorities say the attacks hit civilian infrastructure rather than military positions. The Houthis have not published a detailed account of the targets they intended to strike.
The strikes landed on a city with an unusually large and unusually vulnerable population. Marib is the single largest refuge for Yemenis uprooted by the conflict, hosting more than two million of the roughly five million people displaced nationwide. Many live in informal settlements on the city’s edge, in shelters that offer no protection whatever against blast or shrapnel. Aid workers have warned repeatedly that a missile landing inside one of these settlements would produce casualty numbers far beyond what the city’s hospitals could absorb.
That warning is not hypothetical. On 7 August, Houthi missiles and drones struck displacement camps and residential neighbourhoods in Marib, killing two people and wounding fourteen, according to local officials. Days earlier, attacks on military camps in Marib and Hadramawt killed at least thirty government soldiers, the sharpest single loss the government’s forces had sustained in months. Further strikes on 11 August hit both Marib and the Red Sea port town of al-Makha.
Taken together, the attacks amount to the most sustained escalation Yemen has seen since the truce brokered by the United Nations in April 2022. Hans Grundberg, the UN Special Envoy for Yemen, has said the violence in Marib and Hadramawt leaves the country at its greatest risk of a return to full-scale war since that agreement, and has urged all parties to exercise maximum restraint and return to negotiations. His office has cautioned that continued fighting risks pulling Yemen deeper into a wider regional confrontation.
Marib’s strategic weight explains why it keeps drawing fire. The governorate holds Yemen’s most significant onshore oil and gas fields as well as a power station that supplies electricity well beyond the province, and it has served as the internationally recognised government’s principal stronghold in the north since the Houthis took control of Sanaa in 2014. Control of Marib would give the Houthis both an energy base and a decisive advantage in any future negotiation over territory. The government, backed since March 2015 by a Saudi-led coalition, has held the city through repeated ground offensives at considerable cost.
Renewed fighting would compound an emergency already among the world’s largest. The United Nations estimates that more than 22 million people in Yemen will need humanitarian assistance and protection during 2026, including 5.2 million internally displaced people. Some 18.3 million are classed as acutely food insecure, and more than 2.2 million children under five are acutely malnourished, of whom over half a million suffer the severe form of the condition. Aid agencies have appealed for 2.16 billion dollars to fund this year’s response.
Around 14.4 million people are expected to need water, sanitation and hygiene support, a figure driven by damaged infrastructure and chronic water scarcity that strikes on civilian utilities only worsen. Each escalation also interrupts the aid pipeline itself. Agencies suspend movements when routes become unsafe, and Marib’s camps are among the hardest places in the country to reach once access closes. Health facilities in the governorate were already operating beyond capacity before this month’s escalation, and each new wave of casualties draws staff and supplies away from routine care.
Neither side has signalled any appetite for de-escalation. Government officials accuse the Houthis of deliberately targeting civilians in order to break the population’s will to remain in Marib, a charge the group rejects, framing its recent operations as responses to government military activity. Independent verification of claims from either side remains extremely difficult, and casualty figures reported in the immediate aftermath of strikes frequently change as information is confirmed. What is not disputed is that the weapons used are capable of considerable destructive force and that they are landing in places where civilians live.
What is clear is that the informal calm which held for much of the past three years has broken down, and that Marib is where the cost is being paid. For families who fled Sanaa, Taiz or Hodeidah and settled here precisely because it was safer, the past fortnight has removed the last assumption they were relying on. Diplomats continue to press for a return to talks, but with missiles falling on the city on consecutive nights, the space in which those talks might happen is narrowing.
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