Yemen's Houthis escalate crackdown

In their latest wave of arrests, Houthi rebels in Yemen have jailed scores of people for celebrating a national holiday on what the Iran-backed militia considers the wrong date.

"Since 1962, Yemenis have celebrated September 26 as the birth of the Yemen Arab Republic," said Thomas Juneau, a Middle East analyst and professor at the University of Ottawa in Canada.

"However, for the Houthis, that date symbolically marks a very clear threat to their legitimacy," he said, adding that "any celebration of September 26 can be perceived as a call for a return to a republican Yemen, which is antithetical to what the Houthis stand for."

Instead, the Houthis have sought to enforce September 21 as the country's national holiday.

On that day in 2014, the militia — which was redesignated as terror organization by the US in January 2024 — took over Yemen's capital, Sanaa.

Yemeni civilians have been bearing the brunt of the brutal war for the past decade.

Around half of the 38.5 million population depends on humanitarian aid, hunger is on the rise and severe levels of food deprivation have doubled in Houthi-controlled areas since last year, Joyce Msuya, a senior official in the UN aid coordination office, said in October.

The United Nations and human rights organizations have repeatedly pointed out that Yemenis are suffering under one of the world's worst humanitarian crises, which has already killed hundreds of thousands of people. And the country's humanitarian situation is likely to worsen in the near future.

Since May, the Houthis have been arresting an increasing number of international staff. Around 50 members of the UN, humanitarian organizations and civil society staff have been arbitrarily detained and forcibly disappeared, Human Rights Watch and the United Nations confirmed in October.

"The arbitrary detention of humanitarian personnel and the false accusations against them continue to significantly hinder our ability to provide life-saving humanitarian assistance in Yemen," said Msuya on October 15.