ICRC says it received more than 1,800 requests to trace missing people in Yemen since July
Yemen Herald News 
SANAA, Yemen — The International Committee of the Red Cross says it has received more than 1,800 requests from families searching for relatives who went missing in Yemen since July.
Christine Cipolla, who heads the ICRC’s delegation in Yemen, gave the figure in a statement posted on Thursday.
“Families of the missing have the right to know the fate and whereabouts of their loved ones,” she said.
The account rests on the ICRC’s own records. No independent confirmation of the total has been published, and Yemen Herald could not verify it.
The organisation described the 1,800 as tracing requests lodged by relatives, not confirmed cases of disappearance. It did not say how many had been resolved.
“Behind every missing person is a family,” Cipolla said.
The ICRC said it would register details of the missing and pass Red Cross messages between separated relatives where conditions allow.
It also said it would support the authorities and the Yemeni Red Crescent Society in recovering and handling human remains with dignity.
The organisation did not break the requests down by governorate. It did not say which parties to the conflict the missing were last seen with.
The ICRC has worked in Yemen since 1962 and keeps a permanent presence in several governorates. It runs a community contact centre in Sanaa where families can file tracing requests.
Family-links work is a standing part of that operation. The organisation recorded 2,474 family contact exchanges in Yemen in 2024, counting Red Cross messages, Salamat messages, telephone calls and video calls.
Some of those exchanges were between detainees and their relatives. The ICRC made 51 visits to 19 places of detention in Yemen the same year.
Its teams cleared 458,800 square metres of explosive remnants of war in 2024 and surveyed more than 9.8 million square metres. Mine risk education sessions reached 28,242 people.
ICRC-supported health facilities carried out 1,136,185 consultations that year, including 41,021 antenatal visits.
The organisation acted as a neutral intermediary in the largest detainee exchange of the war. It flew 869 former detainees on 15 flights between April 14 and April 16, 2023.
A further 104 were released from Saudi Arabia to Yemen on April 17 that year, at the request of the Saudi-led coalition.
That exchange followed talks in Switzerland under the Supervisory Committee on the Implementation of the Detainees’ Exchange Agreement. The ICRC co-chaired the committee with the U.N. Office of the Special Envoy for Yemen.
Daphnee Maret led the Yemen delegation at the time. Cipolla has since taken the post.
The tracing requests announced on Thursday span roughly three months. Fighting resumed across Yemen in July, after the Houthis declared a blockade on Saudi shipping.
Hostilities restarted after an Iranian aircraft tried to land in Sanaa without Saudi authorisation, Al Jazeera reported. Strikes on Sanaa airport followed, and the Houthis retaliated.
Al Jazeera described the exchanges as the most serious since a United Nations-brokered truce halted large-scale fighting in 2022.
Yemen’s government said its warplanes struck Houthi positions in Hodeidah, Marib and al-Jawf on Sept. 6. The Houthis said Saudi aircraft and cruise missiles struck al-Jawf, al-Bayda, Marib and Taiz the following day.
The Houthis also accused Saudi Arabia of an air strike on a prison in al-Hazm, saying seven people were killed and seven injured. Riyadh did not immediately comment.
Saudi Arabia said Houthi attacks hit Abha, Khamis Mushait, Jizan and Najran in September. Maj. Gen. Turki al-Malki, the coalition spokesman, said at least 73 people were wounded in the kingdom, including women and children.
On Oct. 5, Rashad al-Alimi, chairman of the Presidential Leadership Council, announced an offensive he called Operation Yemen Dawn in a post on X.
Al-Alimi said the campaign aimed to restore state institutions, retake Sanaa and end Houthi control of the capital. He said it was not directed at civilians.
The Coalition to Support Legitimacy in Yemen said hours earlier that it was providing full operational support to Yemeni forces.
Government forces said the same week that they had taken the Bab al-Mandab strait and the port of Mokha. The Houthis denied it.
Al Jazeera said it could not independently verify battlefield claims from either side.
The World Health Organization said in September that at least 728 people had been killed or wounded since Aug. 23, most of them in Taiz and along the western coast.
The United Nations health cluster later recorded 5,166 casualties in Yemen from Aug. 6, including 959 deaths.
The International Organization for Migration said more than 201,000 people had been displaced since September. Taiz accounted for 57 percent of them.
The agency counted 29,519 displaced families across 10 governorates. More than 3,600 people crossed into Djibouti.
Abdusattor Esoev, who heads the IOM mission in Yemen, said displaced families were arriving without shelter or food.
The United Nations humanitarian response plan published in March counted more than 22 million Yemenis in need of assistance.
It put 18.3 million people at acute levels of food insecurity and more than 2.2 million children under five acutely malnourished, 516,157 of them severely.
The same plan recorded 5.2 million people displaced inside the country. It sought $2.16 billion to reach 12 million of them.
Cipolla did not say whether the organisation had raised the missing-persons caseload with either side.
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