UN rights chief urges immediate de-escalation as Yemen’s civilian toll climbs
Yemen Herald News 
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, called on Monday for an immediate halt to the actions driving Yemen back towards open war, warning that the escalation of recent weeks is already producing a rising civilian toll in a country that has little capacity left to absorb it.
Turk urged all parties to “de-escalate tensions and spare the Yemeni people from further misery”, pointing to the accumulated effects of years of conflict, mass displacement and humanitarian breakdown. He said the priority now was to stop any action that risks returning the country to full-scale fighting, and to restore the restraint that had broadly held since the truce arranged in 2022.
His office set out the arithmetic behind the appeal. At least seventeen civilian casualties from Houthi attacks have been recorded in government-controlled areas since 6 August, alongside two casualties reported in Houthi-controlled areas in late July. The figures are drawn from the office’s own verification work and are described as a minimum rather than a full count.
The incidents behind those numbers span several fronts. On 7 August, a missile struck the Jaw al-Naseem camp for internally displaced people in Marib, injuring six civilians including a child. Camps of that kind house families who have already moved once or several times, and who have no realistic option to move again.
Two days later, missile and drone attacks on Mokha port in Taiz governorate killed three port workers and injured four others. The UN Human Rights Office said it was still verifying reports of further attacks on the same port on 14 and 15 August that may have caused additional civilian casualties. Multiple civilian sites were reportedly struck in the area, including fuel storage facilities and a residential compound at the Saudi field hospital in Mokha.
On 11 August, a cargo ship was hit in the Bab al-Mandab Strait. Four crew members were killed, three Pakistanis and one Indonesian, and several others were injured. Yemen’s government said the toll reached six, including two Yemeni rescuers who died after reaching the stricken vessel. The strait carries a large share of the traffic moving between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, and attacks there put both merchant crews and Yemeni coastal communities at risk.
Much of the maritime activity follows a declaration the Houthis made on 20 July, when the group announced a blockade of Saudi shipping using Bab al-Mandab. Since then the tempo of missile and drone launches towards the strait and the Red Sea coast has risen sharply, and the group has also claimed strikes on targets inside Saudi Arabia, including on refinery infrastructure. Several of those claims remain unconfirmed by the authorities or companies concerned.
The military picture has darkened in parallel. Earlier this month the Houthis mounted their deadliest ground assault in years, killing 58 government troops mainly in the oil-producing province of Marib, according to a Yemeni military source cited in agency reporting. The government has not published a full casualty breakdown, and the Houthis have made their own competing claims about losses on both sides.
Turk reminded all sides of their obligations under international humanitarian and human rights law, saying they must refrain from attacks on civilians and civilian objects and take every feasible precaution to avoid civilian deaths, injuries and damage to civilian infrastructure. That framing matters in the current phase, because much of the damage has fallen on ports, fuel depots and medical facilities rather than on front-line positions.
The humanitarian consequences of striking that infrastructure are not abstract. The UN Human Rights Office says at least 18 million Yemenis are already food insecure, in a country that imports the overwhelming majority of its staple food. When a Red Sea port is damaged or when fuel storage is destroyed, the effect passes quickly into transport costs, market prices and the reach of aid convoys in inland governorates, well beyond the district where the missile landed.
Millions of Yemenis remain displaced inside the country, many of them in informal settlements on the edges of towns where shelter is thin and services are provided almost entirely by aid agencies. Those agencies have spent successive years operating with less money than their appeals request, forcing repeated decisions about which districts and which forms of assistance to cut. A renewed offensive redistributes need faster than funding can follow it.
Yemen’s return to sustained fighting followed the collapse last month of the arrangement that had held since 2022. That truce was never converted into a political settlement, and the underlying disputes over territory, revenue, salaries and the future shape of the state were left unresolved. What it did deliver was a measurable reduction in civilian casualties, which is now being reversed.
The UN human rights office does not have enforcement powers, and statements of this kind function mainly as a public record and a form of pressure. Their practical effect depends on whether the states with influence over the parties choose to act on them. For the moment, the trajectory described by Turk’s office is moving in one direction, and each week of attacks on ports and camps narrows the space in which a return to negotiations could be arranged.
About the Author
