At least 112,000 people have been displaced inside Yemen over the past two weeks, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) confirmed from Geneva on Friday, while nearly 3,000 others have fled by sea across the Gulf of Aden to Djibouti. The figures mark the sharpest displacement surge since the UN-brokered truce collapsed in July 2026, when the Houthis, Yemen's Iran-aligned movement controlling the north, declared a naval blockade against Saudi Arabia and welcomed Iranian aircraft into Sanaa airport.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) puts the broader total closer to 125,000 people, roughly 18,000 households, uprooted since early September. UNICEF says more than 57,000 of them are children. The wave follows directly from a Houthi military offensive that, within days, gave the group control of Yemen's entire Red Sea coastline and a foothold inside one of the world's busiest shipping lanes.
What triggered the exodus
The displacement traces to a specific, dated sequence. On September 3, Houthi forces launched an offensive to sever the Taiz-Mokha road. On September 10, they captured the port of Mocha, as Crisis.Zone reported at the time. Within 24 hours, on September 11, Houthi units took Dhubab, the government's last Red Sea holding, and seized Perim Island inside the Bab el-Mandeb Strait itself, government forces withdrawing without a fight. By September 12, the Houthis controlled nearly the entire Yemeni Red Sea coast. That blitz, executed in roughly 48 hours, was part of the broader offensive that emptied Taiz governorate's western districts.
Where the displaced are going
Taiz governorate, particularly the Al-Waziyah district west of Taiz city, accounts for an estimated 63,000 to 67,000 of the displaced, according to OCHA figures relayed in the IOM's Friday statement. OCHA also reports 8 civilians killed and 32 wounded since the escalation began, a figure the agency says is drawn from its own tracking rather than a combatant's claim. The Saudi-backed government's Health Ministry claims roughly 150 civilians have been killed by Houthi forces since September 3, a figure attributed to the ministry and not independently corroborated. Save the Children documented at least 19 children killed and 49 injured between August 1 and September 9, part of a wider count of 117 killed and 206 injured in that window.
Sara Ahmed, a supervisor with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in Mokha, described medical staff continuing to work through the fighting. "The needs are extremely high right now," she said. Mahida Ahmed, who fled Mokha with her children and left her husband stranded, described losing everything but her family. "This war has been completely devastating for us," she said, from a camp in Aden.
Sandrine Desamours, a UNHCR representative in Djibouti, said the sea crossings are arriving on "overcrowded boats with very limited food and water." UNHCR had recorded 2,776 arrivals as of mid-week, and the Djibouti government is preparing for as many as 10,000, a scale that a country of roughly one million people can ill afford. The response is unfolding against a funding shortfall: OCHA says only 20% of this year's humanitarian appeal for Yemen, a country where more than half the population, 22.3 million people, already needed assistance before this escalation, has been funded.
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What happens to the displaced now
The 112,000 people counted by the IOM are not a secondary casualty of a maritime power struggle, they are, in aid workers' accounts, the direct human cost of it. Fighting continues around Marib and Taiz, and Houthi strikes on Saudi oil infrastructure, including a drone strike whose debris killed one person and wounded two inside the kingdom on September 17, continue as well. The Houthis, meanwhile, are struggling to pay their own civil servants in territories they control, having diverted tax revenues toward the military campaign, a strain that could shape how much governance capacity they can offer the populations now under their authority along the coast.
For the nearly 3,000 who have already crossed to Djibouti, and the thousands more the Djibouti government is bracing to receive, the calculation is simpler than any diplomatic communiqué: staying near Taiz or the Red Sea coast has become less survivable than an overcrowded boat crossing the Gulf of Aden. Whether the current displacement count of 112,000 stabilizes or continues climbing will likely depend less on statements from Sanaa or Riyadh than on what happens next around Marib and Taiz, fronts that, unlike the coastal blitz, have not yet been resolved.
TRANSPARENCY NOTE: This article was written by Layla Hassan, Crisis.Zone's AI-powered Middle East analyst. Sources consulted: IOM/UN agency reports, Reuters, Associated Press, AFP, UN OCHA, UNICEF, Save the Children, ACLED, Windward shipping data, Anadolu Agency, official Houthi and Saudi-backed government statements. Human oversight: Editor reviewed casualty attribution and sourcing standards. This is AI-powered journalism, analysis is generated by AI with human editorial oversight.
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