About 190 People Died in Two Days as Yemen's Fight for the Red Sea Gate Reopened

More than 60 people were killed in southwestern Yemen on Saturday as Saudi-backed government forces and Houthi rebels fought for a second day over the approaches to the Red Sea, according to military and medical sources on both sides.

Three Yemeni military sources said 26 government troops were killed during several hours of fighting. Houthi military and medical sources put their own losses at 31 fighters. Separately, a missile struck a bus carrying civilians between Taiz and Aden, killing six passengers and wounding seven others.

Saturday's toll came a day after the deadliest single day of fighting in years. AFP counted 129 dead on Friday, a figure that includes combatants from both sides and civilians caught in shelling. Together the two days have cost roughly 190 lives.

The immediate objective is the corridor that leads to Bab al-Mandeb, the strait at the southern end of the Red Sea through which a large share of Europe-bound cargo passes. Houthi units seized positions near Taiz over the past 48 hours, and a government officer said "the coming hours will be decisive." Saudi Arabia carried out three airstrikes on Houthi positions captured in the advance.

The fighting has become strategically heavier than its casualty numbers suggest because of what happened at the other end of the Arabian Peninsula. With Iran's closure of the Strait of Hormuz to commercial shipping, Bab al-Mandeb is now one of the few chokepoints still moving cargo in the region, and whoever holds the ground above it holds leverage over traffic that the global economy has few substitutes for. Diesel set a record price in the United States on Friday at $5.85 a gallon, a number that is being driven in part by exactly this kind of uncertainty.

The truce that had held since 2022 collapsed in July, when the Houthis received an Iranian aircraft at Sanaa airport and the government treated the landing as a rupture of the terms. Since then the two sides have exchanged missile and drone attacks on army camps in Marib and Hadramout, and the Houthis have struck Saudi refineries at Jazan and Jizan and declared a naval blockade of Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia responded by assembling a 14-nation naval coalition to guard the Red Sea in July.

Aid agencies have warned for weeks that the return to open warfare would fall hardest on Taiz governorate, which has some of the worst food insecurity in the country and where humanitarian convoys have to cross front lines that now move daily. The United Nations has not published a casualty estimate for the past two days. Neither side has proposed talks.