On Sunday, the Houthi rebel group, which controls large parts of Yemen, entered United Nations’ offices in the detaining at least 11 people working for the organization and also taking property, including data storage devices.
The Houthi security forces raided the offices of the World Food Program, the World Health Organization and UNICEF, the UN’s children’s agency. Sources say those detained include seven World Food Program staffers and three UNICEF workers.
“I strongly condemn the new wave of arbitrary detentions of UN personnel today in Sanaa and [port city] ,” Hans Grundberg, the UN envoy for Yemen, said in a statement issued Monday. He said the UN was doing everything it could to free its staffers and that they should be released “immediately and unconditionally.”
The raid on UN premises came after Israel bombed a cabinet meeting of the Houthi’s de facto government in Sanaa last Thursday. The Houthis at Israeli territory. Since October, 2023 there has been a back and forth of exchange between the two, with the Houthis firing drones and rockets and Israel launching air strikes on Houthi positions.
In the Israeli strike on August 28, the Houthi government’s prime minister, Ahmed Ghalib al-Rahawi, and 11 other officials, including ministers for sports, culture, foreign affairs, social affairs, electricity and agriculture,
Although al-Rahawi was considered a technocrat and his absence won’t have any major impact on the Houthis’ military structure, his death can be considered a “serious setback,” Ahmed Nagi, a senior Yemen analyst with Brussels-based think tank, Crisis Group International, told UK newspaper, tThe Guardian, this week.
Why are Houthis detaining civilians?
The conservative, Islamist Houthis , first as part of an insurgency against Yemen’s dictatorship in the early 2000s, then from 2014 in a civil war that broke out when they took control of the capital. Most recently, they have fought an international Saudi-led coalition that supported their opponents, the internationally recognized government, in the civil war.
The civil war is currently stalemated, with the Houthis controlling northern parts of the country, including the capital Sanaa and most of the country’s population, and their opponents, who are based in Aden on the southern coast, controlling southern parts. The civil war has also caused a humanitarian crisis in Yemen and the UN reports that around 21 million people regularly require aid.
Over the past few days, Houthi military leaders have promised to take revenge for the Israeli strike and tightened security. In a televised speech given after the deaths were confirmed, Houthi leader Abdul Malik al-Houthi also warned locals that anybody suspected of being a spy for Israel would be punished.
Yemen expert: UN workers a ‘default target’
“The Houthis will launch a major internal security crackdown,” Yemen expert Mohammed al-Basha, who runs the US-based risk consultancy, Basha Report, predicted in a newsletter to clients on Sunday. “The crackdown will also extend to staff of INGOs [international non-governmental organizations], NGOs [non-governmental organizations] and foreign embassies in Sanaa, as well as banks, money transfer companies and currency exchange shops.”
Anybody linked to international organizations risks being targeted, al-Basha confirmed to The New York Times.
The UN staff abductions also come after several months of internal crackdowns by the Houthis, Yemeni journalist Adnan al-Jabarni wrote on social media platform, X (formerly Twitter). Recently “the group became consumed by its obsession with those it calls traitors, agents, hypocrites, and mercenaries,” he said. Since the start of this year, many civilians have been detained in the crackdown, al-Jabarni said.
Targeting UN staff almost seems to have become a default Houthi response to security events, al-Basha noted.
Ongoing Houthi crimes against civilians
The Houthis have been detaining people associated with aid or civil society groups, as well as individuals associated with the former US embassy in Sanaa for several years now.
After a crackdown on aid and civil society workers in mid-2024, Thomas Juneau, a Middle East expert with the University of Ottawa in Canada,, that the detention of aid workers could be explained by the fact that “the Houthis feel they need to further consolidate their power,”
The Houthis themselves claimed that the arrests they made included members of “an ” operating undercover in a humanitarian agency.
“They’ve jailed a lot more people in Sanaa, including people from their own ranks, because they became so paranoid that their ranks have been infiltrated,” Hisham al-Omeisy, senior Yemen advisor with the European Institute of Peace, added at the same time. The Houthis were in “full panic mode,” he explained.
In January this year, another eight UN staff were kidnapped. This came just after the Houthis had released 25 crew members of a ship, the Galaxy Leader, that they had been holding captive since November 2023.
Experts speculated that workers from the UN made for better bargaining chips — the eight abductions came just as the US was deciding whether to designate the Houthis a terrorist organization.
“The Houthis picked up the UN staff because they are more valuable for negotiating a deal,” Abdulghani al-Iryani, a senior researcher at the Sanaa Center for Strategic Studies,
Thousands of ‘forced disappearences’
In a statement this week, two Yemeni human rights organizations, the US-based Association Maonah for Human Rights and Immigration and the Yemen-based Yemeni Network for Rights and Freedoms, pointed out that 34 UN staff were still being detained by the Houthis. Twenty-three of them had been held for several years, the organizations said, and one had died while in prison.
In a recent report, the Yemeni Network for Rights and Freedoms says it has documented about 2,678 cases of forced disappearances of civilians, in Houthi-controlled areas, between January 2018 and April 2025. That includes politicians, media workers, civil society activists, lawyers and academics.
“Alongside the detention of hundreds of activists and political opponents, [this] represents a flagrant breach of international humanitarian law,” it said in a joint statement with Association Maonah.
With additional reporting by Jennifer Holleis.
Edited by: A. Thomas
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