1,540 casualties in a day: Yemen's army claims 474 strikes on Houthi fronts as the war's second front burns hotter

Sanaa — Yemen's war is burning hotter by the day. The country's armed forces said they carried out 474 airstrikes and precision-targeting operations against Houthi positions in the previous 24 hours, killing or wounding 1,540 Houthi personnel and destroying or disabling 216 military vehicles and other military capabilities, most of them on the Taiz fronts. The operations involved warplanes, drones, artillery, missiles and rocket launchers across several fronts, including areas south of Haradh, the coast, Kattaf, Marib, Al-Bayda, Lahj, Sanaa and Saada, the military said. The strikes were particularly concentrated on the Taiz fronts, where they targeted Houthi gatherings and reinforcements, sources of threats, and command-and-control centres — and, the army claimed, disrupted Houthi efforts to make a breakthrough there. The forces said they would continue operations aimed at restoring state authority and protecting Yemen's security and sovereignty. The escalation is no longer confined to Yemen's borders. Saudi Arabia said debris from an intercepted ballistic missile fell in the southern Asir region, injuring a resident in the Ahad Rafidah governorate. The Houthis, who control Yemen's most populous areas and much of the north, have intensified missile and drone attacks on Saudi Arabia in recent weeks, including strikes against cities and energy infrastructure, while also targeting Saudi-linked shipping in the Red Sea. Civilians are paying the price on the ground. Yemeni authorities said Houthi shelling killed five people, including a child, in the southwestern Taiz province on Wednesday; the legal affairs minister said a mortar shell struck a residential area. A senior Yemeni security commander, Maj. Gen. Mohammed Salem al-Khawlani, was killed in clashes with the Houthis in Taiz — the highest-ranking security official killed since the escalation resumed in July. The World Health Organization said on September 28 that more than 800 people — 838 — had been killed and over 3,000 wounded, with tens of thousands displaced, since fighting reignited in early August after four years of relative peace under the 2022 truce. The figures, the WHO noted, did not distinguish between civilians and combatants. The agency warned that Yemen's renewed escalation is pushing an already weakened healthcare system toward a "breaking point", with trauma cases displacing maternal health patients in hospitals and displaced families at risk of cholera as they struggle to find clean water. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk said civilians are bearing the brunt of the surge in violence, documenting 32 civilian deaths — including 15 children and three women — since August, and 125 people killed or wounded in the latest flareup. His office also documented Houthi attacks on sites for internally displaced people. The return to war has opened a second front in the US-Israeli war with Iran. When the United States and Israel attacked Iran in February, the Houthis initially appeared willing to sit out the fighting; since then they have thrown themselves back into confrontation, and the Red Sea route for Gulf energy exports faces growing risk as traffic through the Strait of Hormuz remains largely disrupted. For Yemenis, the arithmetic of this war is measured in hospital beds, displaced families, and graves.