become a focal point of the renewed fighting<\/a>.<\/p>\nAl Jazeera\u2019s Maha Ali, reporting from Taiz on Saturday, said the region is seeing continued escalation and intense fighting across several fronts around the city, with some of the fiercest fighting happening on its western outskirts.<\/p>\n
The Houthis have used an exceptionally heavy volume of fire during the assault, she noted, adding that the sound of continuing artillery fire, particularly from the Houthi side targeting western areas, could still be heard.<\/p>\n
Residents are appealing for evacuation as the shelling continues, Ali reported, adding that there have been civilian casualties in the fighting, including from a shell that hit a residential area in Dhubab, killing a baby who died from shrapnel injuries.<\/p>\n
On the Samaa front, she said, the Houthis made advances on Friday in the mountainous area, and fierce clashes are continuing there between government forces and the rebels. Several field sources told Ali that large numbers of residents have left Samaa, something, she said, that had not happened on this scale in more than a decade.<\/p>\n
Following those clashes, Yemeni government forces took control of the Samaa\u00a0fort, southeast of the city of Taiz, after heavy fighting, the government-run Saba news agency reported.<\/p>\n
A military source told Saba that the armed forces, backed by local popular resistance fighters from the Samaa\u00a0district, secured the fort after \u201cviolent battles\u201d, leaving dozens of Houthi fighters killed or wounded while others fled.<\/p>\n
Key border crossing closed<\/p>\n
On Saturday, the army\u2019s media official Ammar al-Sami\u2019i told Al Jazeera that the government had closed the al-Houban crossing in Taiz.<\/p>\n
The crossing had previously been closed for nine years and was later reopened to civilians in 2024 for \u201chumanitarian reasons\u201d, Sami\u2019i said, as the road is one of Yemen\u2019s most important connections between territory held by the opposing sides. It connects Houthi-held al-Houban to government-held Taiz city.<\/p>\n
Sami\u2019i said security reasons are behind the closure, following an attempt by the Houthis to infiltrate Taiz via the road, attacks in the vicinity and a general military build-up.<\/p>\n
A fragile truce struck between the government and the Houthis in 2022 collapsed in July this year, and fighting in Yemen has escalated significantly since then.<\/p>\n
In mid-September, the Houthis swept across parts of western Yemen, seizing the port city of Mocha and key strategic islands in the Bab al-Mandeb strait.<\/p>\n
Since then, anti-Houthi forces have largely stabilised the front lines.<\/p>\n
Hundreds of thousands of people<\/a> have been displaced since the fighting restarted.<\/p>\nYemen has been embroiled in civil war since the Houthis seized the capital of Sanaa in 2014, forcing the internationally recognised government to retreat to Aden.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Yemeni army says it has carried out hundreds of strikes on the capital, Sanaa, and other areas…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":791309,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[5704,49,57308,632,50,51,47,52,48,25322],"class_list":["post-791308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-conflict","tag-headlines","tag-houthis","tag-middle-east","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-yemen"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791308","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=791308"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791308\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/791309"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=791308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=791308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=791308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}