The Houthi militia continues defying regional and international appeals to alleviate the suffering of the Yemeni people and respect their right to live in dignity.
The group carried out a wave of arrests in June 2024. Dozens of Yemeni employees working with international humanitarian aid and diplomatic organizations in Yemen, including organizations affiliated with the United Nations, were abducted on allegations of espionage.
Houthi interrogators extracted confessions under duress from innocent detainees that echoed the charges manufactured against them by the group.
Detainees were promised release if they confessed to the fabricated charges. Houthis, however, didn’t keep their promise, but shared such confessions with Houthi-linked media outlets to justify their acts.
Condemning the arrests, Yemeni Minister of Information, Culture
and Tourism Muammar Al Eryani called on the international community in September 2024 to pressure the Houthis to release all forcibly detained employees of the United Nations, international and local organizations and diplomatic missions.
“The Iranian-backed Houthi terrorists publicize a series of forcibly extracted confessions of Yemeni detainees, many of whom are among the elite, including academics and experts, who spent many years serving in international humanitarian aid organizations and diplomatic missions in Yemen, using them as material for political propaganda. Such a heinous crime reveals the group’s obvious disdain for Yemeni people, barbarism, backwardness, and lack of moral values,” Al Eryani said.
Multinational forces have responded to the call, most prominently in the dispatch of a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier task force to the Red Sea. In January 2025, U.S. Central Command forces struck 14 Iranian-backed Houthi missiles that were loaded to be fired in Houthi controlled areas in Yemen.
“The actions by the Iranian-backed Houthi terrorists continue to endanger international mariners and disrupt the commercial shipping lanes in the Southern Red Sea and adjacent waterways,” said Gen. Michael Kurilla, thencommander of U.S. Central Command. “We will continue to take actions to protect the lives of innocent mariners and we will always protect our people.”
Many innocent victims have been subjected to kidnapping, enforced disappearance, and psychological and physical torture by the Houthis for years, and their reputations have been tarnished by publishing their photos and confessions that were extracted under coercion, the minister said.
Demanding immediate release of the arbitrarily detained staff, Diala Haidar, Yemen researcher at Amnesty International, said in July 2024:
“This chilling wave of arrests targeting the human rights and humanitarian community is yet another stark reminder of the lengths the Houthi authorities will go to in their crackdown on civil society. In addition, these raids will exacerbate the already precarious and deteriorating humanitarian and human rights situation in Yemen because many of those arrested were working to provide assistance or protection to those most in need.”
Sources: Asharq Al-Awsat, Amnesty International, U.N.