IOM says 145,308 people displaced in Yemen since June as Taiz absorbs more than half
Yemen Herald News 
TAIZ, Yemen — More than 145,000 people have been displaced across eight Yemeni governorates since fighting escalated on the west coast in June, the International Organization for Migration said.
The agency put the figure at 145,308 in the count it published on 28 September.
The count rose by 15,870 in the week to 28 September, measured against the total it recorded on 21 September.
Taiz governorate has absorbed the largest share. IOM recorded 81,444 displaced people there, more than half the national total.
That figure rose by about 8,000 in a single week.
Aden recorded the second-largest weekly increase after Taiz, the agency said.
The tally runs from June, when fighting intensified along Yemen’s Red Sea coast.
The rate has climbed through September.
IOM reported 18,500 people displaced in 72 hours in the first week of the month.
It put the running total past 46,000 on 11 September. The figure topped 76,000 the following day.
It has roughly doubled again since.
The agency logged 85,000 on 13 September and 93,864 by 15 September.
By 17 September IOM counted 104,796 displaced people, or 17,461 households.
Its breakdown that week placed more than 63,000 of them in Taiz governorate.
Within Taiz, the agency recorded 21,018 people in Jabal Habashi, 12,642 in Al-Ma’afer and 8,250 in Al-Shamayatayn.
Lahj governorate held 26,400 displaced people, about 19,000 of them in Al-Mudharabah and Al-Arah.
Aden held more than 3,500 at that point.
The agency also recorded rising displacement in Abyan, Hadramout and Marib.
A further 2,776 people crossed from Yemen into Djibouti, IOM said.
IOM attributed the movement to fighting between Houthi forces and government-aligned forces reaching closer to populated areas, leaving residents to abandon their homes with little.
Three districts in Taiz emptied as the front moved: Maqbanah, Jabal Habashi and Al-Ma’afer.
The supply route linking Mokha to Taiz city has been cut, the agency said.
Displacement in the earlier weeks reached the west coast, Taiz, Lahj, Aden and Ibb.
Host communities are absorbing the arrivals under increasing pressure, according to IOM.
The response has been narrower than the caseload.
IOM registered 1,159 households for in-kind aid by mid-September. It was delivering non-food items to 460 households and shelter assistance to 449.
Protection services had reached 758 people.
The agency had pre-positioned 8,000 water, sanitation and hygiene kits for deployment within 72 hours.
It was distributing 1,500 hot meals twice a day to people crossing the border, it said.
Amy Pope, the director general of IOM, described repeat displacement when the September total stood near 46,000.
“Families are being forced to flee for the second or third time since the start of this conflict, with almost nothing left,” she said.
The agency listed shelter, food, water, household items, health care and protection support as the immediate needs.
Its emergency stocks were already depleted by flood relief carried out earlier in the year, IOM said.
The agency asked for safe humanitarian access, protection for aid workers, and the restoration of communication and transport routes.
The displacement figures rest on IOM’s own tracking. No independent confirmation of the tally has been published, and the United Nations and the news agencies carrying the numbers attribute them to IOM.
The new arrivals are landing on a population already counted among the largest humanitarian caseloads in the world.
More than 22 million people in Yemen need humanitarian assistance, according to the humanitarian needs and response plan issued in March 2026.
That plan recorded 18.3 million people as acutely food insecure.
It counted more than 2.2 million children under five as acutely malnourished, of whom 516,157 were severely malnourished.
It put the number of internally displaced people at 5.2 million before the current escalation.
The plan sought 2.16 billion dollars to reach 12 million people.
That plan was published in March, three months before the west coast escalation began.
The fighting driving the current movement has centred on the Red Sea coast.
Houthi forces captured the port of Mokha and the island of Mayyun, taking command of the Bab al-Mandab strait, Al Jazeera reported on 13 September.
Hazem al-Assad, a member of the Houthi politburo, said in that report that navigation and trade through the strait were safe.
Taiz governorate borders that coastline. Mokha lies within it.
Mayyun lies at the mouth of the Bab al-Mandab strait, between the Yemeni mainland and the Horn of Africa.
IOM tracks displacement in Yemen through a monitoring network that reports movements by district.
The UN refugee agency has warned that the movement may not stop at Yemen’s borders.
UNHCR said in mid-September that the fighting raised concerns about further displacement inside the country and additional refugee movements if hostilities intensified, and that reports indicated more people might be preparing to leave.
More than 60 percent of those reaching Djibouti are women, children and older people, the agency said.
Sandrine Desamours, UNHCR’s representative in Djibouti, said the operation was already stretched.
“The response is already under pressure,” she said. “We urgently need more support before more families arrive and needs outpace our capacity to assist them.”
The agency has not published a projection for the months ahead.
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