A quarter of a million people have fled Yemen's renewed war — and almost nobody is talking about it

The numbers the UN reported Tuesday

More than 250,000 people have fled renewed fighting in Yemen, the United Nations said on Tuesday, as the truce that had held since 2022 gave way last month to renewed clashes between Houthi fighters and the internationally recognized government based in Aden. About half of those displaced have sought shelter in Taiz, the southwestern city where access for aid convoys is now "essentially blocked," according to UN News.

In Taiz, sanitation services "have come to a halt" because of a diesel shortage caused by blocked supply routes, UNICEF's representative in Yemen, Akhil Iyer, said. The UN World Food Programme says wheat flour stocks in the affected areas are nearly exhausted — and 10 of Taiz's 16 districts were already at emergency levels of hunger before this round of fighting.

Encircled

UN human rights chief Volker Türk said Taiz City had been encircled by Houthi fighters, and urged them to let aid in immediately, UN News reported. The pre-positioned therapeutic food for malnourished children can't reach the health facilities across the governorate because every route is closed, Iyer said.

The other war underneath the oil war

The same Houthi movement that has spent weeks attacking shipping in the Strait of Hormuz — the campaign that pushed Brent crude near $110 and has tankers burning on the water — is also, on the ground in Yemen, the party holding the siege lines around Taiz. The maritime escalation dominating the headlines is the export of a ground war that has returned to displacing hundreds of thousands of people.

For Canadians, the connection is uncomfortably direct: the diesel prices straining household budgets and the oil-price risk hanging over the Bank of Canada's October 28 decision are ripples from a conflict whose centre of gravity is still places like Taiz.