Cairo, Sep 17: It’s been a week since Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels stormed down the Red Sea coast, extending their reach to a key maritime chokepoint and threatening Saudi Arabia’s oil exports.

The Houthis’ biggest land grab in years reignited Yemen’s 12-year civil war and pushed up global fuel prices. It also gave Iran another potential source of leverage as the United States has started to loosen Tehran’s grip on the Strait of Hormuz, on the other side of the Arabian Peninsula.

The Houthis are also firing at Saudi oil facilities and tankers. An attack on Saudi Arabia’s east-west pipeline, blamed on Iran-backed militias in Iraq, added to an unfolding nightmare for the kingdom and rattled world markets.

The rebel blitz has forced some 125,000 Yemenis to flee their homes. The civil war has killed over 150,000 people and at times pushed the country to the brink of famine.

Now the rebels appear to be eyeing Yemen’s oil-rich east. So far, the only thing standing in their way is Yemen’s Saudi-backed government and an array of forces that have fought each other as recently as January. Saudi Arabia’s most important ally, the US, appears to be sitting this one out.

The Houthis are fighting on several fronts

The Houthis captured the important Red Sea port city of Mokha before taking several islands near the narrow Bab el-Mandeb strait, through which some 12 per cent of world trade passes in peacetime. They are also just 32 kilometres (20 miles) from Djibouti, a small African nation hosting US and other military bases.

The Houthis first swept down from their northern heartland in 2014, capturing the capital, Sanaa, and much of northern Yemen. Saudi Arabia intervened the following year, and fighting raged until a 2022 ceasefire.

In recent days, there has been heavy fighting in and around Marib, a central city in an oil-rich province of the same name. Previous Houthi offensives have failed to capture the city, which also serves as a military hub for Saudi-backed forces. The Houthis also threaten the western city of Taiz, a front line for much of the conflict.

Tightening the noose on the world’s largest oil exporter

The Houthis want Saudi Arabia to lift a long-running blockade on the territory they control.

“It is Saudi Arabia that closed the Bab el-Mandeb strait to shipping traffic to and from Yemen and imposed an unjust blockade on the country,” Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, a member of the Houthis’ political bureau, told The Associated Press.

The Saudis and their allies have long struggled to contain or deter the Houthis, and may be tempted to seek a diplomatic solution to halt the attacks. That might ultimately require US concessions to Iran, the only country with leverage over the Houthis.

The US, which bombed the Houthis under the Biden and Trump administrations, has shown no interest in getting involved this time around, and the Houthis appear keen to keep it that way. They say they are only attacking Saudi shipping.

Traffic has recovered in the Red Sea, for now

Windward, a shipping firm, reported a dip in traffic through the Bab el-Mandeb from 35 daily transits before the Houthi advance to 25 after, but traffic has already recovered and climbed to 45 transits on Sunday.

The Houthis could still expand their target bank beyond Saudi ships and tankers. During their self-styled blockade of Israel at the height of the war in Gaza, the Houthis attacked ships in the Red Sea with no known connection to that conflict.

“At the moment, their focus is on Saudi-linked shipping,” said Valentin d’Hauthuille, a Middle East analyst at ACLED, a conflict monitor. But they might “extend the criteria according to which vessels are assessed to be Saudi-linked’ to increase pressure on both Saudi Arabia and the global economy.

There are signs of diplomacy, but the cost could be high

Regional mediators have sprung into action, but a diplomatic agreement appears unlikely without some kind of breakthrough in the wider Iran war.

Iran wants the US to lift a blockade and sanctions that have devastated its economy, while the US seeks the full reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and a deal to roll back Tehran’s nuclear program. Neither side has shown any sign of budging since a preliminary agreement quickly crumbled over the summer.

Last weekend, Oman hosted a meeting between US and Houthi representatives, a Houthi official and another individual familiar with the talks told The Associated Press this week.

The US says it has been in “constant contact” with the Saudis, a close ally and the recipient of billions of dollars in American military assistance.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman recently visited Egypt, which has served as a regional mediator. A government official in Turkiye, another potential mediator, said this week that it was in talks with Iran and the United Arab Emirates to try and lower tensions.

The Houthi attacks are the first test of a new defence pact among Saudi Arabia, NATO member Turkiye and nuclear power Pakistan. But officials from Turkiye and Pakistan say they have not received a Saudi request for support.

The humanitarian situation in Yemen is worsening

The latest fighting has killed eight civilians and wounded another 32, according to the UN humanitarian office, which says an estimated 125,000 people have fled their homes. The Health Ministry in the Saudi-backed government says the Houthis have killed around 150 civilians since Sept. 3.

Saudi Arabia said Thursday that debris from an intercepted Houthi drone killed one person and wounded two others in the kingdom.

Yemen was the poorest Arab country even before the civil war, and has experienced widespread hunger in recent years because of the conflict and the Saudi-led blockade.

The Houthis’ detention of UN and aid workers has hampered international assistance in the territories they control. Experts say the Houthis have struggled to pay civil servants, leading to some unrest, and have diverted much of their tax revenues to their military wing.

The UN humanitarian office, known as OCHA, says only 20 per cent of its humanitarian appeal for Yemen has been funded, and that “millions risk losing access to food, healthcare, nutrition, water and protection services.”

“The needs are extremely high right now,” said Sara Ahmed, a supervisor with Doctors Without Borders in Mokha. Doctors are working under difficult conditions to keep essential services running despite hearing airstrikes, she said.

Mahida Ahmed fled the fighting in Mokha and is now sheltering in a displacement camp in Aden, where the Saudi-backed government is headquartered. She said she left in a hurry, with her children but no belongings, while her husband is still stranded in Mokha.

“This war has been completely devastating for us,” she said.

Geneva, Sep 17: Human rights experts commissioned by the UN’s top human rights body say they have found “reasonable grounds” to believe the United States committed war crimes in two strikes in Iran, including on a school in the southern city of Minab.

They also accuse Iran’s theocratic government of carrying out crimes against humanity against its own people in a report published Thursday.

The report, while not binding, adds to international evidence gathered about crimes in the war in Iran, and could eventually be used in efforts to reach justice in international courts.

The fact-finding mission on Iran, chaired by jurist Sara Hossain of Bangladesh, is made up of independent experts and was created in 2022 by the Human Rights Council, the UN’s top human rights body, which is based in Geneva.

The experts were expected to present their findings on Monday to the council, which is made up of 47 UN member countries.

The international fact-finding mission says its findings on US war crimes center on a pair of US airstrikes that killed at least 178 civilians, including women and children.

At the start of the US-Israeli war against Iran in February, at least one U.S. missile hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh school in Minab, according to an Associated Press investigation. There has been no final accounting of what happened.

Iranian state media have said 168 people were killed in the strike, most of them children.

“Following the United States and Israeli attacks on 28 February, the mission found reasonable grounds to believe the United States committed the war crime of launching indiscriminate attacks resulting in the loss of life or injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects,” a U.N. statement about the team’s findings said.

The US State Department did not immediately respond to a request from The Associated Press seeking comment.

In their report, the experts concluded that “the building of the school was the intended point of impact” and the resulting damage wasn’t the result of an errant strike or collateral damage from an attack on a compound of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard next to the school.

The Trump administration has yet to directly accept responsibility or release the findings of a Pentagon investigation into the school bombing.

The UN-backed team based its allegations on two strikes — one involving Tomahawk missiles that hit the “clearly identifiable” school, and another in which Precision Strike Missiles dispersed tungsten pellets over a “clearly identifiable sports complex and residential area” in the southern city of Lamerd, also on Feb. 28.

The UN-backed team said 22 civilian men and women were killed. US Central Command has denied responsibility for the strike on Lamerd

The team found that killings by state security forces in Iran have occurred on a “staggering scale,” and civilians faced “gross human rights violations and crimes against humanity committed by their own government.”

Iranian security forces carried out “violent repression” over the last two years by firing assault rifles into crowds, beating protesters and arresting healthcare workers, among other things, the team said. Detainees faced torture, and were deprived of legal counsel, leaving their families “in the dark” about their whereabouts, the experts said.

The Tehran government intensified the use of the death penalty, and said more than 70 people – including five women and three boys – remain at “imminent risk of execution,” they added.

“The report concluded that many of these gross violations amount to crimes against humanity — including murder, imprisonment, torture, and other inhumane acts committed as part of a widespread and systematic attack on civilians,” the statement said.

The experts said the United States and Iran should halt all rights violations and crimes, and provide “full reparations to victims.”

The report, built on a “victims-centred approach,” was based on interviews with 73 people both inside and outside Iran, along with documentation, satellite imagery, photographic and video material and information from “credible” organizations and experts, the experts wrote.

The ongoing conflict that has driven people from their homes in Iran as well as an internet shutdown and a lack of full cooperation from the two governments partially impeded the team’s efforts to get information.

Nearly three dozen requests from the experts for information from Iran’s government went unanswered, they said, as have requests in June to the US government for information and meetings with officials.