Yemen’s human rights commission opens field investigation into attacks on al-Mokha port

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Yemen’s National Commission to Investigate Alleged Violations of Human Rights has begun a field inquiry into the missile and drone attacks on Mokha, the strategic port city on the Red Sea coast of Taiz Governorate that has been struck repeatedly this month. The commission’s deployment was reported by the state news agency Saba and has not so far been described independently by other outlets.

The attacks themselves are well documented. Yemen’s military said an assault on Mokha on Sunday 9 August killed seven people, among them both civilians and military personnel, and wounded around thirty others, adding that air defences intercepted eleven drones involved in the operation. Some outlets reported a higher toll, with at least eleven people said to have been killed across the wider coastal area. The Yemeni army later described the scale of the barrage as roughly twenty-five ballistic missiles together with waves of drones and at least one explosive-laden boat.

According to the army’s account, the shelling struck part of the maritime pier at Mokha Port along with facilities used to service vessels and to load and unload cargo and livestock. Attacks resumed around midnight between Sunday and Monday, and further ballistic missiles were fired at the port on 12 August. Military sources also said an attempt to strike the pier directly had been thwarted. On 14 August the government reported a further attack that it said killed at least four people.

The local authority in Taiz Governorate condemned the assault as a war crime targeting an economic and relief lifeline, and urged human rights organisations to document it as a violation of international humanitarian law. That characterisation reflects the position of the internationally recognised government rather than a determination by any court or independent investigative body, and no such determination has been made.

The commission conducting the inquiry was created by republican decree in 2012 and operates as a national mechanism for monitoring and investigating alleged human rights violations committed by all parties on Yemeni territory. Its mandate traces back to the Gulf Initiative and its implementation mechanism and to Security Council resolutions on Yemen adopted in 2012 and 2014. It has published a series of periodic reports over the past decade, and its field monitors have received training from international transitional justice organisations. Its findings have historically carried more weight as documentation than as a basis for prosecution, since Yemen’s courts are fragmented along the lines of the conflict.

Mokha’s significance explains why the port has drawn sustained fire. It is one of the few functioning harbours on Yemen’s Red Sea coast outside Houthi control, and it handles commercial cargo and relief supplies for a country that imports most of its food and fuel. Damage to its pier and handling equipment narrows a supply route that is already constrained, at a moment when the United Nations says six million people in Yemen face emergency levels of deprivation, the highest figure recorded anywhere in the world.

The strikes on the port coincided with an attack at sea nearby. The cargo ship Tihamah, Tanzania-flagged and Egyptian-owned, was hit by missiles as it approached port close to the southern end of the Bab al-Mandab Strait. Yemeni officials said four crew members and two Yemeni rescuers were killed, and survivors told news agencies that a second missile landed while rescue work was under way. Pakistan’s representative at the United Nations Security Council said three Pakistani and one Indonesian crew member were among the dead.

The government in Aden has described the campaign against Mokha as an extension of Iranian escalation, language that places the port strikes within the wider confrontation now running through the region. Iran denies arming the Houthis. The group has not been the subject of an independent finding of responsibility for the Mokha attacks, although Yemeni military and civil authorities attribute them to it directly.

The escalation was central to the Security Council’s session on Yemen on 13 August. The UN Special Envoy, Hans Grundberg, told members that the country faces a more serious risk of returning to large-scale conflict than at any point since the truce mediated by the United Nations in 2022, and said the war expanding across the Middle East had reached Yemen’s shores. He urged both sides to de-escalate immediately and work towards a ceasefire.

Council members condemned the attacks on shipping in broadly similar terms while disagreeing over their cause. Greece described the security of navigation in the Red Sea, the Bab al-Mandab and the Gulf of Aden as critically important. Bahrain called for a firm stance to protect seafarers. The United Kingdom said Iran must end its long-standing support for the Houthis, while Russia argued that the stagnation of the peace process had drawn the group into a confrontation it blamed on the United States and Israel.

For the residents of Mokha, the practical questions are narrower. Repairs to the pier and to the handling facilities determine how quickly food, fuel and relief cargo can move again through one of the country’s few open Red Sea gateways, and the commission’s field team will be recording damage and casualties in a town that has been hit on at least four separate occasions in under a week.