UNHCR says more than 100,000 Yemenis have been displaced on the Red Sea coast

The UN refugee agency said on Tuesday that fighting along Yemen’s western coast has driven more than 100,000 people from their homes inside the country and pushed thousands more across the Bab el-Mandeb Strait to Djibouti. In the past four days alone, UNHCR counted about 2,400 arrivals on Djibouti’s northern shore. Most, the agency said, were women, children and older people.

“Humanitarian access remains a major challenge. Insecurity, damaged roads, telecommunications disruptions and movement restrictions are affecting operations,” UNHCR said. Families left in a hurry with little luggage. Shelter, food, clean water, clinics and protection desks are the first shortages in towns that are already hosting displaced people. More than 65,000 registered refugees and asylum seekers already inside Yemen, many of them Somali and Ethiopian, sit in the same path of the fighting.

The International Organization for Migration had warned on Sunday that its Displacement Tracking Matrix had recorded more than 85,000 displaced people, including 82,164 since 1 September. UNHCR’s Tuesday figure puts the internal total above 100,000. The two numbers describe the same fortnight from different desks.

Sandrine Desamours, UNHCR’s representative in Djibouti, said new arrivals were exhausted after the sea crossing and carried what they could hold. Markazi and other landing points have seen this traffic before. The current pulse is faster.

The military facts behind the flight are a Houthi push down the Red Sea coast against forces of the internationally recognised government and their Saudi backers. The campaign has given the movement a tighter hold on approaches to Bab el-Mandeb, the strait that ties the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden. With the Strait of Hormuz already a war zone, that second chokepoint now carries cargo that used to go the long way around Arabia. Houthi units have also struck at Saudi cities and energy sites. Saudi and Yemeni aircraft have answered with raids on Houthi ground.

This article is not a battle study. The humanitarian file is ugly enough on its own. A coast road that should carry fish and fuel now carries people who left after a drone or an air raid hit a house. Reuters spoke in Aden to Muhammad Aiyash, who took his three children south after a strike killed his wife. They arrived at a new camp with nothing. That is the unit of the 100,000.

Yemen’s war is twelve years old. What is new in this bulletin is speed and direction: tens of thousands of people moving in days, toward the south and toward Africa, because a front on the Red Sea jumped forward. Aid agencies cannot pre-position in towns they cannot enter. Damaged roads and dead phone networks are not colour. They are why a warehouse in Aden does not reach a family two districts away.

Djibouti now has to feed and screen a boatload every few hours. Yemen’s government-held south has to mark new sites on the edge of Aden. Donors who already underfund the Yemen appeal will be asked again. The number to check next week is not a battlefield map. It is whether UNHCR’s 100,000 has become 150,000, and whether the Djibouti four-day count of 2,400 has doubled.