Yemeni rights network says Houthi forces demolished 1,774 homes and civilian buildings since 2014

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ADEN, Yemen — A Yemeni rights group says Houthi forces have demolished 1,774 homes and civilian buildings across 17 governorates since September 2014.

The Yemeni Network for Rights and Freedoms released the figure on Thursday in a report titled “Punitive House Demolitions: A Constant Terrorist Policy of Houthi Militias,” the state news agency Saba reported.

The documented cases run from September 2014 to August 2026, the network said. The period covers the Houthi seizure of Sanaa and the war that followed.

Residential homes make up the largest share. The report lists 1,129 of them.

It also counts 136 mosques and Quranic schools, 179 bridges and public roads, and 146 farms and water wells.

A further 41 schools and educational premises, 39 government buildings and 19 health facilities appear in the tally.

The summary did not break the total down by governorate.

Commercial premises, buildings owned by political parties and historical landmarks were also among the targets, the network said. It gave no figures for those categories.

The account rests on the network’s own documentation. No independent confirmation of the 1,774 figure has been published, and Yemen Herald could not verify it.

Saba did not say how the network checked its count. The summary the agency carried named no individual cases and quoted no official from the group.

The report’s title carries the network’s own characterisation of the Houthi movement. The group’s authorities in Sanaa have dismissed earlier tallies from Yemeni organisations based in government-held areas as politically directed, and did not comment on this report.

Independent organisations have documented individual demolitions in detail.

Punitive demolition is the destruction of a building as a penalty directed at its owner or their relatives, rather than an act of combat.

The Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies and the Yemeni Coalition for Human Rights said in March 2024 that Houthi forces blew up a house in the Al Hofra neighbourhood of Rada’a, in al-Bayda province.

At least nine civilians were killed, according to that statement. Two children and three women from one family were among them. At least seven people were injured.

Armed men surrounded the house at about 5 a.m. on 19 March 2024, searched it and ordered the residents out before placing explosives inside, the two groups said.

The building was detonated about an hour and a half later. One house collapsed and five others were severely damaged.

Neighbours had asked the men not to go ahead because the houses stood close together, the statement said. Residents pulled victims from the rubble by hand.

The groups linked the demolition to a dispute between the Houthi authorities and the homeowner, Ibrahim al-Zalei.

The Houthi authorities acknowledged the incident the next day. A statement called it a mistake by security personnel who had used excessive force, and said an investigative committee had been formed.

The two groups published their account on 27 March 2024, eight days after the demolition.

The 2024 statement also cited Mwatana for Human Rights, which documented 53 Houthi attacks on civilians in 2021 across several governorates.

Mwatana for Human Rights documents abuses by all parties to the conflict.

The new report lands as fighting spreads across the country.

The International Organization for Migration said last week that more than 200,000 people had been displaced since the escalation began, up from 76,000 in mid-September.

Taiz has taken the heaviest blow, the agency said. More than 3,700 people have left Yemen by sea for Djibouti.

“People are running for their lives and finding nowhere safe to go,” said Amy Pope, the IOM director general.

The World Food Programme said on 2 October that three in four families in parts of Yemen were going hungry.

The Houthis took Yemen’s entire Red Sea coast in September. Rashad al-Alimi, chairman of the Presidential Leadership Council, announced an offensive on 4 October to retake all territory the group still holds, including Sanaa.

Accountability for wartime conduct has advanced slowly. The Human Rights Council closed its sixty-third session on 7 October by adopting a resolution on technical assistance and capacity-building for Yemen without a vote.

The text asks the High Commissioner for Human Rights to report on that assistance at the Council’s sixty-sixth session, and asks all parties to the conflict to implement Security Council resolution 2216 of 2015. It creates no investigative mandate.

The resolution is numbered A/HRC/63/L.33. The Council’s sixty-third session opened on 7 September and ran for a month.

The resolution also asks the Secretary-General to make sure the Office of the High Commissioner has the resources to deliver the assistance.

United Nations planners estimated in March that more than 22 million Yemenis needed assistance, with 18.3 million acutely food insecure.

That response plan counted 5.2 million internally displaced people and sought $2.16 billion to reach 12 million of them.

More than 2.2 million children under five were acutely malnourished, the plan said, 516,157 of them severely.

The Yemeni Network for Rights and Freedoms has issued similar counts before. It documented more than 4,800 Houthi violations in Hodeidah during 2025, and 958 violations across six districts in western Yemen in a separate report.

Yemen Monitor reported the Hodeidah figure separately, in its own account of the network’s documentation.

The network said its demolition figures cover 17 of Yemen’s 22 governorates.