IRC suspends field movements on Yemen’s west coast after strikes on Mokha
Yemen Herald News 
The International Rescue Committee has temporarily suspended field movements along Yemen’s west coast after strikes hit densely populated areas in and around the port city of Mokha, the aid agency said, warning that renewed fighting between the Houthis and the internationally recognised government is putting both civilians and relief workers at risk. The suspension applies to staff travel in the affected area rather than to the organisation’s presence in the country, but the IRC said it is already disrupting programme delivery and limiting the agency’s ability to reach communities that depend on it.
The strikes on Mokha in mid-August marked one of the sharpest escalations on the Red Sea coast in several years. Yemeni government sources reported that Houthi forces fired ballistic missiles and launched armed drones at the city, striking residential districts and the area around the port. Mokha, which sits on the Bab al-Mandab approaches south of Hodeidah, has been held by forces aligned with the government since 2017 and had been comparatively quiet under the truce arrangements that have held, unevenly, since April 2022.
The IRC said its health and protection services on the west coast remain available through supported clinics, and that its programmes in other governorates are continuing as normal. What has stopped is the movement of teams between sites, which in practice governs mobile clinics, outreach visits and the assessments that determine where supplies are sent next. Agencies operating in Yemen have described this kind of partial suspension as the most common outcome of a security incident: the organisation stays, but its reach contracts.
Staff in Mokha have reported the immediate effects on ordinary care. Children are missing routine immunisation appointments and patients are avoiding clinics because they are afraid to leave their homes, according to the IRC’s health team in the city. Interruptions to childhood vaccination are a particular concern in Yemen, where measles has circulated persistently and coverage has never fully recovered from the collapse of the health system’s routine services early in the war.
The agency framed its decision as a warning rather than a withdrawal. Yemen, it said, cannot afford a return to full-scale war, and a wider collapse of the informal truce would push a population already at the edge of survival into a far worse position. Roughly 18 million people in Yemen require some form of humanitarian assistance and more than 4.5 million remain displaced, figures that have proved stubborn even during the quieter stretches of the past four years.
The suspension comes during a broader deterioration. The United Nations Security Council was briefed this month on escalating violence in and around Yemen, with the UN special envoy warning that the country risks being drawn into a wider regional conflict. Several council members condemned Houthi attacks on shipping and on Saudi Arabia. Separately, a missile strike on the commercial vessel Tihama in the Bab al-Mandab Strait killed six people, including three Pakistani crew members, and drew condemnation from a number of governments.
For humanitarian organisations, the sequence is familiar and difficult to plan around. Front lines that reactivate after a period of calm generate displacement at exactly the moment that access contracts. The International Organization for Migration has recorded more than 10,000 people displaced inside Yemen since January, with Marib absorbing over half, and agencies have warned that new movement along the west coast would add to a caseload they are already struggling to fund.
Funding is the second constraint. Humanitarian appeals for Yemen have been repeatedly underfunded, and the Food and Agriculture Organization has warned of drought risk and worsening food insecurity in the coming months. Aid officials have said that a shrinking budget combined with reduced access produces a compounding effect: the same amount of money buys less reach when teams cannot move freely, because supplies must be pre-positioned rather than delivered on demand.
The political picture behind the fighting remains unresolved. The Houthi movement controls Sanaa and much of Yemen’s populous north-west, while the internationally recognised government, backed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, operates from Aden. Talks mediated by Oman and the United Nations have produced periods of relative calm but no settlement, and each round of escalation has tended to harden positions rather than accelerate negotiation.
Aid agencies have also raised the treatment of humanitarian staff themselves. The United Kingdom told the Security Council this month that it remains deeply concerned about the continued detention by the Houthis of dozens of United Nations personnel, along with a larger number of non-governmental organisation and civil society staff, some held for more than two years. Detentions of this kind have caused several organisations to reduce their footprint in Houthi-controlled areas independently of any specific security incident.
The IRC has not said how long the suspension of field movements will last, and has indicated that it will resume travel when it judges the risk to staff acceptable. In the meantime the practical question for communities around Mokha is whether the clinics that remain open can absorb demand from an area that had been served partly by teams that can no longer reach it.
undefined Aid officials in the city say residents are already asking whether the interruption signals a longer withdrawal, and the agency has stressed that it has no plans to leave the west coast.
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