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“The fighting in Yemen is spreading across multiple fronts, triggering a rapidly growing refugee crisis and causing more than 130,000 people to flee their homes since early September,” UNHCR spokesman Babar Baloch told reporters in Geneva.
The mass displacement follows the rapid advance of Iran-backed Houthi fighters up Yemen’s west coast to the Bab el-Mandeb Strait in recent weeks and clashes with Saudi-backed Yemeni government forces.
The city of Taiz in southwest Yemen remains the center of the crisis, Baloch said, accounting for more than 60 percent of the overall displacement.
Nowhere is safe
“Many families remain in the governor’s area itself [are] unable to move to safer locations due to fighting, blocked roads, or lack of transportation fuel,” he said.
Displacements were also reported in Al Jawf, Marib and Hudaydah provinces. According to UNHCR, the majority of refugees are women and children, and many have been forced to flee several times.
Before the recent escalation of conflict, more than 5.2 million people had been internally displaced in Yemen, which has been hit by conflict and economic collapse for more than a decade. A UNHCR spokesman said at least 22 million people – more than half the country’s population – were estimated to need humanitarian assistance. Yemen also hosts around 65,000 refugees and asylum seekers, mainly from Somalia and Ethiopia.
Baloch stressed that more and more Yemenis are now becoming refugees, as civilians fleeing clashes in the Gulf of Aden continue to arrive in Djibouti. More than 3,000 people have arrived so far, while hundreds more have landed in neighboring Somaliland and Puntland. The number of new refugees in Djibouti has surpassed the total number of Yemeni refugees arriving in recent years.
More than 10,000 migrants are expected to arrive in Djibouti, Baloch explained, as sea conditions are expected to improve in mid-October, allowing further crossings.
UNHCR operations in Djibouti are only 15 percent funded, while in Yemen in 2026, the agency received only $34 million of the $194 million needed even before the latest escalation.
