To understand Yemen’s present agony, one must first understand that this is not a country without history — it is a country whose history has been systematically disregarded. Yemen sits at the southwestern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, commanding the Bab el-Mandeb strait through which roughly 10% of global trade passes. It is home to some of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on earth; its ancient kingdoms — Saba, Hadramawt, Himyar — traded frankincense and myrrh with Rome and China when most of northern Europe was still forested wilderness. The architecture of Sana’a’s old city, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, predates Islam by centuries. To bomb it, as the Saudi-led coalition has repeatedly done, is not just a war crime. It is an assault on human memory.

Modern Yemen is an artificial construct, the product of two poorly reconciled histories. North Yemen, the Yemen Arab Republic, emerged from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and spent decades oscillating between imamate theocracy and republican governance, punctuated by civil war in the 1960s in which Egypt and Saudi Arabia backed opposing factions. South Yemen, the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, was a British colonial creation that became, upon independence in 1967, the Arab world’s only Marxist state. The two Yemens unified in 1990 under President Ali Abdullah Saleh, a Sana’a politician of formidable cunning whom he himself described as “dancing on the heads of snakes.” For two decades, Saleh managed Yemen’s multiple fissures — tribal, regional, sectarian — through a combination of patronage, coercion, and strategic ambiguity. He was not a good man, but he was a functioning one. His removal would prove catastrophic.

The structural weaknesses of Yemen that preceded the current war are important to understand, because they are often invoked — cynically — by those who wish to minimize the responsibility of external actors. Yes, Yemen was the Arab world’s poorest country before 2015. Yes, it faced severe water scarcity, a youth unemployment crisis, a secessionist movement in the south, and a tribal insurgency in the north. But poverty and fragility are not destiny. They are, in large part, the product of policy — both domestic and international — and they do not transform a failing state into a charnel house. War does that. Deliberate bombing of civilian infrastructure does that. Blockades that prevent food and medicine from reaching starving populations do that.

In January 2011, inspired by the fall of Ben Ali in Tunisia and Mubarak in Egypt, hundreds of thousands of Yemenis took to the streets demanding the end of Saleh’s 33-year rule. The protests were remarkable for their discipline and their breadth: they included students, women, civil society organizations, trade unions, and ordinary citizens who had grown weary of a system that enriched a small elite while leaving most Yemenis in grinding poverty. For a brief, extraordinary moment, Change Square in Sana’a became one of the most hopeful places on earth.

Saleh responded with characteristic violence. Snipers killed 52 protesters in March 2011. But the killings backfired: military commanders defected, tribal leaders withdrew their support, and Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) mediators began working on a transition deal. The resulting GCC Initiative — brokered largely by Saudi Arabia and endorsed by the United States and United Nations — gave Saleh immunity from prosecution in exchange for transferring power to his vice president, Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi. This deal was, in retrospect, a catastrophic mistake. It rewarded impunity. It gave Saleh a political future when accountability might have defused future conflict. And it put Hadi — a weak, unpopular figure with no independent political base — in charge of a transition process he was wholly unqualified to lead.

The National Dialogue Conference that followed, from 2013 to 2014, was in many ways a genuine attempt at inclusive political reform. Representatives from across Yemeni society — women, youth, southern separatists, Houthis — participated in months of negotiations. The final document proposed a federal solution that would have reorganized Yemen into six regions. For those who believed in the process, it represented hope. For those who had the power to derail it — and who saw in federalism either a threat to their interests or an opportunity for total power — it represented a target.

No actor in the Yemen conflict has been more consistently misrepresented in Western media than the Houthi movement, formally known as Ansar Allah (“Supporters of God”). They are routinely described as an “Iranian proxy,” a characterization that is simultaneously true in a limited sense and deeply misleading in a broader one. Understanding the Houthis requires understanding that they emerged from Yemen’s own political and social landscape, and that their rise was enabled — at every turn — by the failures of the Yemeni state and the cynicism of regional powers.

The Houthi movement originated in the 1990s in Sa’dah governorate in northwestern Yemen, among the Zaidi Shia community, a sect that represents roughly 35% of Yemen’s population and whose imams once ruled the country for centuries. The movement’s founder, Hussein Badr al-Din al-Houthi, combined Zaidi revivalism with opposition to American imperialism and Israeli policy in Palestine. His signature slogan — “God is great, death to America, death to Israel, curse the Jews, victory to Islam” — is repellent and should be condemned without equivocation. It is also, for the movement’s domestic base, primarily a political-theological statement of anti-imperialism rather than a literal military program. This does not make it acceptable. It does make it comprehensible in context.

After Hussein al-Houthi was killed by Saleh’s forces in 2004, the movement fought six intermittent wars against the central government, wars in which the Saleh regime was supported at various points by Saudi Arabia. The experience of those wars hardened the Houthis militarily and deepened their hostility toward Riyadh. By the time of the Arab Spring, they were a battle-hardened militia with genuine popular support in the north, not a marginal sect.

Their advance on Sana’a in 2014 was facilitated by a shocking alliance with their former enemy: Ali Abdullah Saleh. The ex-president, furious at his forced removal and seeking revenge against Hadi and the political establishment, used his still-intact networks within the Yemeni military to clear the path for Houthi forces. The fall of Sana’a in September 2014 was less a military conquest than a political implosion, the final collapse of a state that had been hollowed out by years of elite predation. Hadi fled to Aden, then to Riyadh. And Saudi Arabia, alarmed by what it interpreted as an Iranian takeover of its southern neighbor, began preparing for war.

On March 26, 2015, a Saudi-led coalition of nine Arab states launched Operation Decisive Storm against Houthi-controlled Yemen, with the stated aim of restoring the internationally recognized government of Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi. The United States and United Kingdom provided logistical support, intelligence sharing, mid-air refueling, and — crucially — arms. The coalition’s air campaign began immediately and has, with fluctuating intensity, continued ever since.

The decision to intervene was made by a Saudi establishment that had several overlapping motivations, not all of them consistent with the narrative of defensive action. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), then defense minister and newly ascendant within the Saudi royal court, saw the conflict as an opportunity to demonstrate Saudi strategic leadership, reverse what Riyadh perceived as Iranian encirclement, and establish his own credentials as a decisive leader. The war was, to a significant degree, MBS’s personal project — and like many personal projects of authoritarian leaders, it proved far easier to start than to stop.

The coalition’s military objectives were clear. Its political strategy was almost entirely absent. Beyond restoring Hadi — a figure with minimal legitimacy even before his flight from Yemen — there was no coherent vision of what a post-war Yemen would look like, who would govern it, or how the underlying political conflicts that had produced the war would be resolved. This strategic vacuum has defined the conflict ever since. The coalition has spent a decade bombing Yemen without being able to articulate what, precisely, it is bombing toward.

The humanitarian consequences of the air campaign have been catastrophic. The Yemen Data Project, which has meticulously documented coalition strikes since 2015, found that approximately one-third of all strikes have hit military targets. The remaining two-thirds have hit farms, markets, hospitals, water treatment facilities, schools, wedding ceremonies, and funeral processions. This is not a record of military targeting that went wrong occasionally. It is a record of systematic disregard for civilian life that went right, in the sense that it functionally destroyed Yemen’s civilian infrastructure and with it the capacity of the population to survive.

The coalition also imposed a blockade on Yemen’s ports and airports that, at its most severe, prevented the entry of humanitarian aid, fuel, food imports, and medical supplies. Yemen imports approximately 90% of its food staples. A blockade of Yemeni ports is not a military tactic; it is starvation policy. International humanitarian law is unambiguous on this point, regardless of the diplomatic language used to obscure it.

Of all the dimensions of the Yemen conflict, none is more corrosive to Western moral credibility than the continued arms trade with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The United States, United Kingdom, France, Canada, and other democracies have sold hundreds of billions of dollars in weapons to coalition members since 2015, weapons that have been directly implicated in documented war crimes. The bombs that struck the wedding in Mokha. The school bus in Dahyan. The funeral hall in Sana’a. The fish market in Hodeidah. American and British-manufactured.

This is not a matter of disputed interpretation. In 2019, the United Nations Group of Eminent Experts on Yemen documented what it described as “possible war crimes” by all parties, but noted that the coalition’s air campaign had caused the majority of civilian casualties and had involved the “destruction of objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population.” In 2021, the Biden administration briefly suspended offensive weapons sales to Saudi Arabia pending a review. The suspension lasted weeks. By late 2021, sales had resumed. The review, such as it was, found that American interests — arms industry revenue, strategic partnerships, oil market stability — outweighed any consideration of Yemeni lives.

The United Kingdom’s record is particularly egregious. British arms sales to Saudi Arabia surpassed £23 billion between 2015 and 2023. In 2019, the UK Court of Appeal ruled that the government had unlawfully failed to assess whether coalition strikes had broken international humanitarian law. The government’s response was to conduct a review — which it conducted — and then resume arms sales. Parliament debated the issue repeatedly. Campaign groups litigated it repeatedly. Activists blockaded weapons factories. None of it changed the fundamental calculus: the British government, like the American one, decided that arms exports and strategic relationships were worth more than Yemeni lives. This is a political choice. It should be named as one.

France has been, if anything, even less transparent. French arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the UAE continued throughout the war with minimal parliamentary scrutiny, despite evidence that French weapons had been used against civilians. The French government’s public posture — that it could not verify the end use of weapons once sold — is a legal fiction that collapses on examination. When specific weapons are found at specific massacre sites, the fiction becomes obscene.

The United Nations has described Yemen as home to the world’s worst humanitarian crisis for most of the past decade. This designation has become so familiar that it has lost its capacity to shock. Let us try to restore that capacity.

According to the most recent UN estimates, more than 21 million Yemenis — approximately 70% of the population — require some form of humanitarian assistance. Roughly 17 million face acute food insecurity. In the most affected governorates, nearly one in two children under five suffers from stunted growth as a result of chronic malnutrition. Yemen’s healthcare system has been reduced to approximately 50% functionality, with hundreds of hospitals and clinics either destroyed, damaged, or shuttered due to lack of staff, medicine, and fuel. The country has experienced cholera outbreaks on a scale not seen in modern times: in 2017 alone, more than one million suspected cases were recorded in a matter of months, the largest cholera epidemic documented in recorded history.

The collapse of the healthcare system is directly attributable to the war. Coalition airstrikes have struck hospitals in Sa’dah, Hajjah, Taiz, and Hodeidah. The blockade has prevented the import of medicines, medical equipment, and the fuel needed to run generators in facilities without a stable electricity supply. Doctors Without Borders (MSF) has had multiple facilities struck, sometimes repeatedly. The organisation has protested, filed complaints, and documented the coordinates it shared with coalition forces. The strikes continued.

Water and sanitation infrastructure has been similarly devastated. Yemen was already one of the most water-stressed countries on earth before the war. Coalition strikes on water treatment facilities, pumping stations, and sewage networks have transformed a crisis into a catastrophe. The cholera outbreaks of 2017 and 2019 were directly caused by the collapse of clean water access. They were not acts of God. They were the foreseeable consequences of deliberate attacks on civilian infrastructure.

The word “famine” has a specific technical definition in the world of humanitarian affairs: it requires a determination that at least 20% of a population faces extreme food shortages, that acute malnutrition rates exceed 30% among children, and that mortality rates exceed two deaths per 10,000 people per day. By this definition, parts of Yemen came perilously close to officially declared famine in 2018, 2021, and again in 2023. The UN repeatedly warned of famine; international donors repeatedly pledged assistance; and those pledges were repeatedly insufficient, underfunded, and hampered by access restrictions imposed by all parties to the conflict.

But the famine risk in Yemen cannot be understood as a natural consequence of war. It is the product of specific policy choices. The coalition’s naval and air blockade of Hodeidah port — through which more than 70% of Yemen’s food imports historically flowed — was the single most consequential contributor to food insecurity. When the coalition bombed the port’s cranes in 2015, it did not merely damage infrastructure. It made mass starvation a predictable outcome. When the coalition imposed tightened restrictions on fuel imports, it did not merely create energy shortages. It stopped the water pumps, the hospital generators, and the irrigation systems on which food production depended.

The Houthis bear responsibility too — for diverting humanitarian aid, for restricting access to besieged areas, for recruiting child soldiers, for ballistic missile strikes on civilian areas in Saudi Arabia and civilian populations within Yemen. There is enough blame in Yemen to go around several times. But the asymmetry of power, and the asymmetry of accountability, should not be obscured by a false equivalence. The coalition has the most advanced military technology on earth. It has access to UN Security Council support. It has the endorsement of the world’s major democracies. The scale of civilian harm it has caused reflects not the fog of war but the fog of political convenience.

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UNICEF has consistently ranked Yemen among the most dangerous places on earth to be a child. The statistics are numbing in their scale and devastating in their specificity. More than 10,000 children have been killed or maimed by the conflict. More than 2,500 children have been recruited into armed groups. Roughly 3.7 million children are out of school. In some governorates, entire cohorts of children have never attended a single day of formal education.

Child malnutrition in Yemen is both acute and chronic. Wasting — a measure of immediate starvation — affects more than two million children under five. Stunting — the result of long-term malnutrition that permanently impairs physical and cognitive development — affects approximately one-third of all Yemeni children. These are not temporary conditions. They are lifelong disabilities, imposed on children who had no role in creating the conflict that caused them.

The school bus attack of August 2018 became, briefly, an international news story. A coalition airstrike hit a bus carrying children to a summer school programme in Dahyan, Sa’dah governorate, killing 40 children — most between the ages of six and eleven — and injuring 56 others. The bomb was American-made: a Lockheed Martin MK-82 500-pound laser-guided munition. The manufacturer’s address is Bethesda, Maryland. The coalition initially described the strike as a “legitimate military operation.” A subsequent investigation by the Saudi-led Joint Incidents Assessment Team — the coalition’s own accountability mechanism — acknowledged that the target had been “incorrectly selected.” No one faced criminal accountability. Sales continued.

What is rarely discussed in coverage of these incidents is the cumulative psychological trauma they represent. Generations of Yemeni children have grown up under conditions of permanent fear, displacement, loss, and deprivation. The long-term mental health consequences — post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety, developmental disorders — will shape Yemeni society for decades. The infrastructure to address these needs barely exists. There is virtually no international funding for Yemeni mental health services. The children of Yemen are not merely being starved and bombed; they are being psychologically destroyed, and the world is largely indifferent.

The Yemeni economy was fragile before 2015. It is now, in important respects, no longer an economy at all. GDP has contracted by more than 50% since the war began. The Yemeni riyal has lost approximately 80% of its value. Public sector workers — teachers, doctors, civil servants — have gone unpaid for years in Houthi-controlled territories, following the Central Bank’s relocation to Aden by the internationally recognized government in 2016. This decision, whatever its political logic, had the practical effect of severing millions of public sector employees from their salaries and accelerating the humanitarian collapse in northern Yemen.

Yemen’s oil production — the foundation of government revenue — has been effectively shut down. The country’s nascent industrial sector has been destroyed. The fishing industry, which once provided employment and protein to millions of coastal Yemenis, has been devastated by the war and the blockade. The agricultural sector, which employed a significant portion of the population, has been gutted by the destruction of irrigation infrastructure, the displacement of farming communities, and the dramatic increase in input costs caused by currency collapse and import restrictions.

The result is an economy in which a significant majority of the population depends entirely on humanitarian assistance to survive. This is not resilience. It is the absence of it. Yemen has been reduced from a poor but functioning society to a wholly aid-dependent one, and the aid is chronically underfunded. The UN’s Yemen Humanitarian Response Plan has been consistently funded at between 40% and 60% of required levels. The gap between what is needed and what is given is filled, every year, by preventable deaths.

If Yemen’s humanitarian catastrophe represents the worst of what the old ways of making war can do, its technological dimensions represent something equally alarming: a preview of how war will be fought in the coming decades. Yemen has become, to a disturbing degree, a live testing ground for new military technologies, and the lessons being drawn from it by the world’s major powers should give serious pause to anyone concerned about the future of armed conflict.

The Houthis have made extensive use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and loitering munitions — so-called “kamikaze drones” — in ways that have confounded much more expensive and sophisticated defence systems. Iranian-supplied Shahed-series drones, combined with Houthi modifications and locally adapted designs, have struck targets in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, including the Aramco oil facilities at Abqaiq in 2019, an attack that briefly took 5% of global oil supply offline. The September 2019 Abqaiq strike was one of the most consequential drone attacks in history, and its lessons have been absorbed by military establishments from Washington to Moscow to Beijing.

The coalition, for its part, has used Yemen as a platform to develop and refine its own drone capabilities, as well as its use of precision-guided munitions, signals intelligence, and targeting systems. American contractors have assisted with target selection, and American-supplied intelligence has guided strikes that have, on numerous occasions, resulted in mass civilian casualties. The relationship between advanced Western technology and Yemeni civilian deaths is not incidental. It is structural.

What Yemen demonstrates about drone warfare is both technically and ethically significant. On the technical side: inexpensive UAVs, combined with GPS guidance and commercially available components, can achieve precision effects previously associated only with state-level military platforms. A $20,000 drone can destroy a $20 million radar installation. The asymmetry of cost favours the defender and disrupts the premium-technology advantage that Western military establishments have spent decades and trillions of dollars building. On the ethical side: the accessibility of lethal drone technology means that it will proliferate. The norms — or lack thereof — established in Yemen will shape how these weapons are used globally. The absence of accountability for their use against civilians in Yemen is therefore not just a local tragedy. It is a global precedent.

The Iranian dimension of the Yemen conflict has been the subject of extraordinary exaggeration in Western and Gulf discourse, serving the political needs of those who benefit from framing a complex civil war as a simple case of Iranian aggression. The truth is considerably more nuanced, and the distortions it has been subjected to have had real policy consequences.

Iran’s relationship with the Houthis predates the current war but was limited in scale until the Saudi intervention created a common cause and dramatically increased the strategic value of the partnership. Prior to 2015, Iran’s support consisted primarily of ideological affinity, some weapons transfers, and political alignment. The Houthis shared Iran’s hostility toward Saudi Arabia and the United States, but they were — and remain — primarily driven by Yemeni domestic politics, tribal dynamics, and a specifically Zaidi Shia theological tradition that differs substantially from the Twelver Shiism of Iran.

The Saudi intervention transformed this relationship. Faced with the most powerful military coalition in the Arab world, the Houthis needed sophisticated weapons. Iran, facing Saudi Arabia in a regional cold war across multiple theatres, had powerful incentives to supply them. By the late 2010s, the Houthis were receiving Iranian ballistic missiles, anti-ship missiles, drones, and training. These transfers are real, documented by the UN Panel of Experts, and constitute violations of international sanctions. They should be condemned and addressed.

But “Iranian proxy” as a description of the Houthis is strategically misleading in a way that serves specific interests. It implies that ending Iranian support would end the Houthi movement — a conclusion that is contradicted by the movement’s domestic roots and popular base. It implies that the primary driver of the conflict is Iranian aggression rather than the Saudi intervention — an inversion of the chronological and causal record. And it provides a convenient justification for continued arms sales to Riyadh by framing a war of choice as a defensive necessity. The proxy framing is, in short, a political device masquerading as an analytical one.

From October 2023 onwards, the Yemen conflict acquired a new and globally consequential dimension. In solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza following the October 7 Hamas attacks and subsequent Israeli military campaign, the Houthis launched a sustained campaign of attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. Using anti-ship missiles, naval drones, and helicopter-borne boarding operations, they targeted vessels with connections — real or merely alleged — to Israel, the United States, or the United Kingdom.

The consequences for global trade were immediate and substantial. Major shipping companies rerouted their vessels around the Cape of Good Hope, adding roughly two weeks and significant cost to journeys between Asia and Europe. Insurance premiums for Red Sea transits spiked dramatically. In January 2024, the United States and United Kingdom launched Operation Prosperity Guardian, conducting airstrikes against Houthi missile and drone launch sites in Yemen. The Houthis continued their maritime campaign regardless.

The Houthi maritime campaign presents a profound challenge to simple moral frameworks. On one hand, the targeting of civilian commercial shipping is a violation of international maritime law, regardless of the stated political justification. The crews of targeted vessels — Filipino, Indian, Greek, and other nationals who have nothing to do with Israeli-Palestinian politics — should not be endangered because of decisions made in Tel Aviv or Washington. This is not a legitimate use of force, and it should not be dressed up as one.

On the other hand, the Western response — military strikes that have killed significant numbers of Houthi fighters and, inevitably, civilians — has not suppressed the maritime campaign. It has, if anything, enhanced the Houthis’ domestic and regional popularity. The strikes demonstrate, again, that military force applied to a movement with genuine popular support and deeply embedded political identity does not degrade that movement. It may, in fact, strengthen it. This is not a novel observation. It is the lesson of every counter-insurgency campaign of the past half century. Western policymakers continue to be surprised by it.

The Houthi maritime campaign cannot be understood without understanding how the Gaza war reshaped the political landscape of the Middle East, and specifically how it gave the Houthis an opportunity to transform their image from a regional insurgency into a symbol of Arab solidarity that Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states — visibly reluctant to take strong action against Israel — simply could not match.

For populations across the Arab world, the images of Palestinian suffering in Gaza — the bombed hospitals, the mass displacement, the starvation — produced a level of rage and grief that governments were unable to channel or contain. The Houthis, by taking direct action (however strategically questionable) against shipping they associated with Israeli-connected trade, positioned themselves as the only Arab actor actually doing something. This gave them a popularity dividend that extended far beyond their Yemeni base.

The uncomfortable irony is not lost on observers: the Houthis, who have themselves been responsible for siege tactics, civilian targeting, and man-made famine in Yemen, are being praised across the Arab world for opposing the same tactics when applied to Palestinians. The consistency of the humanitarian argument demands that we condemn siege warfare and civilian targeting wherever they occur — in Gaza, in Yemen, everywhere. But the political reality is that the Gaza conflict gave the Houthis a narrative of resistance that has made them substantially harder to dislodge, negotiate with, or marginalize.

The history of peace efforts in Yemen is, with limited exceptions, a history of diplomacy deployed not to end the conflict but to manage it at an acceptable cost to outside powers. UN Special Envoys have come and gone: Jamal Benomar, Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, Martin Griffiths, Hans Grundberg. Each has produced moments of hope. None has produced a durable settlement.

The reasons for this repeated failure are structural. First, the internationally recognized government of Yemen is not, in any meaningful sense, a functioning government. It is a political coalition held together by Saudi patronage, riven by internal rivalries — between the Presidential Leadership Council members, between northern and southern factions, between the Islah party and the Southern Transitional Council — and lacking any capacity to administer territory, provide services, or pay its own civil servants. Negotiating with this entity as if it were a capable interlocutor is a diplomatic pretence.

Second, the Houthis have no incentive to accept a settlement that does not guarantee them a dominant political role in any future Yemeni state. They control the most populous part of the country, including the capital. They have survived years of coalition bombardment. Their domestic legitimacy, while coercive in many respects, is real. A peace process that treats them as a party to be pressured into a managed surrender will fail because it is based on a false reading of the balance of power on the ground.

Third, Saudi Arabia’s interests have evolved over the course of the conflict in ways that complicate a settlement. By the early 2020s, Riyadh was clearly seeking an exit from a war that had become strategically and financially costly, reputationally damaging, and militarily unwinnable. But the terms of that exit — what guarantees Saudi Arabia would receive regarding Houthi missile and drone capabilities directed at Saudi territory — proved genuinely difficult to negotiate.

The April 2022 ceasefire, brokered by UN Special Envoy Grundberg, represented the most significant pause in fighting since the war began. It held for six months — longer than any previous ceasefire — and allowed significant humanitarian flows. Its eventual expiry without renewal was a genuine setback. But the period of relative calm it created demonstrated something important: when political conditions allow, the parties to this conflict can choose restraint. The problem is not that peace is impossible. It is that those with the power to compel a settlement have consistently prioritized their own interests over Yemeni lives.

In March 2023, China announced that it had brokered a diplomatic normalization agreement between Saudi Arabia and Iran, ending years of severed diplomatic relations following the 2016 storming of Saudi diplomatic missions in Iran after the execution of Shia cleric Nimr al-Nimr. The announcement was a diplomatic bombshell, not least because it demonstrated that Beijing had developed the regional influence and diplomatic credibility to achieve something that Washington — preoccupied with its own role in Gulf security — had been unable or unwilling to attempt.

For Yemen, the Saudi-Iran deal offered the possibility of a significant change in the conflict’s dynamics. If the two principal external patrons of the warring parties were willing to normalize relations, might they also be willing to use their influence to push those parties toward a settlement? Initial signs were cautiously encouraging. Saudi-Houthi talks, facilitated by Oman, made more progress in 2023 than in the previous eight years combined. Saudi Arabia and the Houthis exchanged prisoner lists. Saudi officials visited Sana’a. There was genuine, if tentative, movement.

The Gaza war disrupted this momentum significantly. The Houthi maritime campaign complicated Saudi calculations, because any settlement that appeared to endorse or legitimize the Houthis would now also appear to legitimize their Red Sea attacks. Nevertheless, the underlying dynamic — Saudi Arabia wanting an exit from an unwinnable war, Iran wanting normalized regional relations, the Houthis wanting political recognition — has not fundamentally changed. The conditions for a settlement exist. Whether the political will to pursue it will persist through the turbulence of regional events is the central question of Yemeni diplomacy in 2026.

Any sustainable settlement in Yemen will require not only a ceasefire and political transition, but a credible process of accountability for the atrocities committed by all parties. This is not a utopian demand. It is a practical necessity. Societies that emerge from mass atrocity without any mechanism of accountability tend to relapse into conflict, because the grievances that sustained the war remain unaddressed and the perpetrators retain power and impunity.

In September 2021, in a decision that should be recorded as one of the more shameful acts of the UN Human Rights Council in recent years, the council voted — under intense pressure from Saudi Arabia and its allies, including Western states that fear scrutiny of their own arms exports — to terminate the mandate of the Group of Eminent Experts on Yemen, the only independent international body systematically documenting violations. The practical effect was to extinguish the most credible accountability mechanism that existed. The political message it sent to perpetrators on all sides was unambiguous: there will be no reckoning.

Restoring a credible international accountability mechanism should be a minimum demand of any state that claims commitment to the international humanitarian law it endorses in principle. Beyond that, a genuine accountability framework would require: an independent commission of inquiry with prosecutorial capacity; cooperation from all parties in providing access to sites, witnesses, and documentation; the transfer of financial assets of war profiteers; and, ultimately, an internationally supported transitional justice process within Yemen itself that gives victims a voice in determining what accountability means.

This will not happen quickly, and it will not happen without enormous political resistance from parties that have much to fear from scrutiny. But the alternative — a peace settlement built on impunity and silence — is not a foundation. It is a delay.

There is no clean solution to Yemen’s war. Anyone who claims otherwise is selling something. But the gap between what is being done and what could be done is vast, and it is a gap defined primarily by political will — or rather, its absence. The following are not idealistic demands. They are the minimum requirements of a serious engagement with the crisis.

Suspend arms sales to all parties engaged in documented violations of international humanitarian law. This means Saudi Arabia and the UAE for coalition strikes. It means pressuring Iran to halt weapons transfers to the Houthis. It means recognizing that the arms trade is not a neutral commercial activity when its products are being used to bomb hospitals and starve children. Western governments have legal frameworks that prohibit arms exports likely to be used in serious violations of human rights. They have simply chosen not to apply them.

Fully fund the Yemen humanitarian response. The gap between pledged and delivered humanitarian assistance in Yemen has cost lives — directly, measurably, year after year. The total cost of fully funding the Yemen humanitarian response plan is roughly $4.3 billion per year. The United States spends more than that every three days on its military. This is not a resource constraint. It is a priority constraint.

Support genuine, inclusive negotiations that reflect the actual balance of power in Yemen. This means accepting that the Houthis are a political and military reality that cannot be wished away, and that any sustainable settlement must include a meaningful role for them. It means accepting that the Presidential Leadership Council is not a legitimate government in any functional sense and should not be propped up as one. It means accepting that Yemeni sovereignty requires that Yemenis themselves have primary agency in determining the terms of their political future.

Reinstate international accountability mechanisms. The termination of the UN Group of Eminent Experts’ mandate was a political failure that should be reversed. The documentation of violations, by all parties, is a precondition for any credible peace process and for the historical record that future accountability will require.

Invest in Yemen’s reconstruction and economic recovery. The international community has spent billions on humanitarian relief in Yemen while spending virtually nothing on the economic recovery that would make relief unnecessary. A genuine commitment to Yemeni recovery would require debt relief, investment in infrastructure, support for institution-building, and a long-term development framework. These are not charity. They are the obligations of those who have profited from, enabled, or failed to prevent the destruction of a country.

A generation from now, historians will write about the Yemen war the way historians now write about other great failures of international conscience: with a mixture of comprehension and horror, asking how it was possible that the world knew, and continued not to act. The answer, as always, will be that it was possible because those with the power to act had interests that competed with their stated values, and their interests won.

The children of Yemen have not had the luxury of that analysis. They have lived it. They have grown up in the rubble of what was, within living memory, a civilization of extraordinary depth and resilience. They have watched their parents age by a decade in a year. They have learned to fear the sky. They have gone to school in buildings that lack roofs, when there were schools at all. Some of them have carried weapons. Many of them have carried siblings to graves.

None of this was inevitable. The war was a choice — multiple choices, made by multiple parties, at multiple moments when different decisions were possible. The Saudi intervention was a choice. The arms sales were choices. The blockade was a choice. The failure to fund humanitarian response was a choice. The termination of accountability mechanisms was a choice. The framing of a complex civil conflict as an Iranian proxy war, in order to justify continued military support for one side, was a choice.

Choices that made can be choices unmade. Not easily, and not without cost to the powerful interests that benefit from the status quo. But Yemen’s suffering is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made one, which means it is within human capacity to end it. The question is whether the political will to do so can be assembled before another generation of Yemeni children pays the price of its absence.

Arabia Felix, Happy Arabia. The name was always aspirational. Today it sounds like a charge. Make it true.

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