Saudi Shelling Keeps Hitting the Same Yemen Hamlet

A civilian was killed and another wounded when fire attributed to Saudi forces hit Al Thabit in Yemen’s Qatabir district on June 30, 2025. Local sources said artillery and missiles struck the same villages again on September 28, 2026, as the wider war came back.

The notices read like copies of each other because they are. Al Thabit is a cluster of highland villages on the Saudi line in Saada, the Houthi movement’s northern stronghold, and it has been named in local security reports through years that the rest of Yemen spent calling a truce.

The Hamlet Named in Every Round

Saada security sources said the June 30, 2025 round killed one person and wounded another in Al Thabit. That is the same strip, and the same wording, that local officials have used for gunfire, artillery, and missiles on this district since well before that Monday.

On September 24, 2026, a local source said five shoppers were hurt when rockets and artillery hit Al Thabit. Four days later, local sources said four missiles landed east of Saada city and that artillery and missiles hit residential villages in the same hamlet. No independent death toll was issued for September 28.

Between those dates the name kept returning. Police and security desks in Houthi-held Saada logged Al Thabit in January 2025, when they said gunfire killed a civilian there; in August 2025, when they said machine guns killed another; and in November 2025, when they said shelling killed one person and wounded several more. African migrants appear again and again among the wounded on this belt, a detail the police tallies treat as routine.

AL THABIT IN LOCAL SECURITY REPORTS

1. January 13, 2025: A civilian is killed by gunfire in Al Thabit, Qatabir district, according to local sources.
2. June 30, 2025: Shelling kills one civilian and wounds another in Al Thabit.
3. August 4, 2025: Machine-gun fire kills a civilian in Al Thabit, a security source says.
4. November 14, 2025: Shelling kills one civilian and wounds several other residents in Al Thabit, a security source says.
5. September 24, 2026: Five shoppers are wounded by rocket and artillery fire in Al Thabit, a local source says.
6. September 28, 2026: Artillery and missiles hit residential villages in Al Thabit, local sources say, the same day four missiles strike east of Saada city.

Those entries come from the Houthi-run security apparatus in the province, not from a UN investigation of each round. They still show one fact a reader can check against the map: the same hamlet keeps being named. An earlier notice of a civilian killed in Al Thabit in June sits inside that longer list, not apart from it.

Saada Police Counted 1,117 Casualties in 2024

On January 7, 2025, police in Houthi-held Saada released a year-end tally for the border districts. They said 1,117 civilians were killed or injured in 1,015 violations in 2024, a year much of the country still described as a pause.

The breakdown is almost all ground fire. Border-guard shootings, in the police account, killed 89 people and wounded 561. Artillery killed 44 and wounded 418. Airstrikes, they said, killed one person and wounded four. Add those columns and the 1,117 holds: 134 dead and 983 wounded.

SAADA POLICE BORDER TALLY FOR 2024

The same desk issued another ledger in August 2026 for the Islamic year 1447, which ran from mid-2025 into mid-2026. Saada security said it logged 871 violations and 534 civilian casualties: 559 direct-fire incidents that left 92 dead and 117 wounded, and 312 artillery incidents that left 40 dead and 285 wounded. The police present both tallies as a record of the truce years on this frontier. No UN office has published a matching village-level audit for Qatabir, so the figures stand as the local authority’s claim, not as a verified census.

The Border Strip Has No Safe Side

Qatabir is one of a handful of Saada districts that open onto Saudi Arabia, alongside Munabbih, Shada, Baqim, Razih, and Al Dhahir. The high ground looks into Jazan and Najran. For the Houthis, this is home terrain. For Saudi border units, it is a smuggling line, a launch corridor, and a place where small-arms fire and artillery have been part of the job since the 2015 intervention.

That geography is why Al Thabit keeps turning up when the rest of the war is quiet. A shopper, a farmer, or a migrant walking the ridge is inside a militarized belt even on days when no one is announcing a campaign. Saada security on February 14, 2026, named two men killed in neighboring districts, Abdullah Abdul Wahid Saeed, 30, in Shada, and Nasser Abdo Al-Husseini, 24, in Baqim, and said another civilian and an African migrant were wounded by mortar fire in Qatabir. The names change. The districts do not.

Riyadh almost never answers at that resolution. Coalition statements in 2026 talk about missiles aimed at Abha, Khamis Mushait, Jazan, Najran, Taif, Yanbu, and Riyadh, and about the right to reply. They do not name Al Thabit.

Who Is Shooting at Qatabir?

Two accounts now run in parallel, and they do not meet on the village.

Houthi security and the movement’s military spokesman, Yahya Saree, describe a Saudi campaign: F-15s and Typhoons off Khamis Mushait and Taif, plus rockets from Najran and Jazan, with Saada listed beside Taiz, Hajjah, and Hodeidah. Saree said 38 air and rocket strikes hit Saada, Taiz, and Hajjah in the 24 hours to September 28, 2026, and 35 strikes the next day across Saada, Taiz, Al Jawf, Amran, and Hodeidah. Those daily counts move through war-tracking accounts with no second count attached.

Yemen’s internationally recognized government says it is in the fight for Saada too. Majed al-Nuzaili, the army spokesman, said on September 27 that his forces had carried out 756 targeting operations in 72 hours, including the Kataf, Al Buqaa, and Alab axes in Saada, using aircraft, drones, snipers, artillery, and rockets. On October 2 he said government forces had hit 11 high-value targets in the province. A government military source in the border areas said the Houthis mix those government operations with limited Saudi border-guard fire, including fire aimed at smuggling, and then put the whole file under Riyadh’s name.

Major General Turki Al-Malki, spokesman for the Saudi-led coalition, has not confirmed or denied fire on Al Thabit. After Houthi attacks on September 8 that the coalition said wounded 73 civilians in Abha, Khamis Mushait, Jazan, and Najran, Al-Malki called the strikes a violation of the kingdom’s sovereignty and said the coalition would answer under the UN Charter’s self-defense clause. The villages on the Yemeni side of that line do not appear in his remarks.

WHAT WE KNOW

• The hamlet: Local security in Saada has named Al Thabit in fatal and injury rounds from 2025 into September 2026.
• The government claim: Yemeni army statements in late September and on October 2 put Saada, including the Alab axis, inside their own target lists.
• The coalition line: Al-Malki speaks about intercepts and about strikes on Houthi military sites, not about Qatabir by name.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• Each round’s author: No independent monitor has assigned the September 24 or September 28 Al Thabit fire to Saudi artillery, Saudi aircraft, or Yemeni government aircraft.
• The daily sortie totals: Saree’s 38 and 35 figures, and the 58-to-26 sequence circulated in mid-September, have not been audited by a second party.
• A 2024 UN match: The 1,117 figure is a Saada police tally, not an OHCHR verification.

The honest remainder is ugly enough without the missing labels. Someone with artillery, rockets, and aircraft is hitting a populated border strip, and the people who live there are the ones who show up as shoppers and migrants in the injury lists.

The 2022 Truce Never Reached Here

The United Nations brokered a nationwide truce in April 2022 that largely stopped the big cross-border missile war and the worst inner-Yemen campaigns for about four years. Hans Grundberg, the UN special envoy for Yemen, has treated that pause as the baseline he is now trying to save. On this ridge the pause was thinner.

Police in Saada spent 2024, 2025, and the first half of 2026 counting gunfire and shelling they blamed on Saudi border units, including in months when Sanaa and Riyadh were still talking about a political track. The 1,015 incidents in the 2024 police table, and the 871 in the 1447 table, are the local record of that gap. Cross-border fire into Saudi cities did fall for a long stretch. Fire along the fence, in the account from Saada, did not.

WHAT STILL MOVED ON THE SAADA BELT

• Ground fire: Saada police said border-guard shootings were the largest single category in 2024, at 598 incidents.
• Artillery on villages: The same tally logged 384 ground-shelling incidents and 44 deaths from that fire.
• Al Thabit by name: Local sources kept attaching the hamlet to fatal rounds through 2025, then to the five wounded shoppers in September 2026.
• Migrant wounded: African migrants appear in injury reports from Al Thabit, Qatabir, Baqim, and Munabbih across those years.

A political deal that reopens airports and swaps prisoners can still leave a mountain district inside a live-fire zone. That is the part of the 2022 file this strip exposes.

September Put Saada Back in the War

The larger war did come back, and it did not start in Qatabir. ACLED, the conflict-data project, dates the slide to a Saudi strike on Sanaa International Airport on July 13, 2026, after which the Houthis, in ACLED’s count, carried out 16 attacks on Saudi assets between July 13 and August 14, including seven oil facilities and six oil tankers. Sherwan Hindreen Ali, ACLED’s Middle East research manager, wrote in August that the Houthis and Yemen’s recognized government were already in their fiercest clashes with government forces in years. A Houthi assault on Mocha on August 9, ACLED said, killed at least 11 people, three of them civilians.

By September the west coast was the main stage, with Taiz and Hodeidah taking the displacement, and Saada listed again in both Houthi and government strike claims. United Nations figures put the wider flare-up at least 838 people killed and more than 3,640 wounded. Those numbers mix fighters and civilians. The UN human rights office is slower and narrower.

THE UN COUNT FROM AUGUST

• Displacement: 128,382 people (21,397 households) were displaced from August 1 to September 20, 2026, the UN humanitarian office said, 98 per cent of them from August 31 onward, with Taiz hosting 57 per cent.
• Verified civilians: OHCHR recorded 128 civilian casualties across 37 incidents from August 1 to September 22, including 32 killed and 96 injured; 73 of those casualties were verified in September, and women and children were more than half.
• Aid reach: 90,600 displaced people had received some form of assistance by the September 21 update, while west-coast access was partly suspended.

Grundberg told the Security Council on September 10 that he had already warned of the greatest risk of a return to large-scale conflict since the 2022 truce.

When I briefed this Council last month, I warned that Yemen was facing the greatest risk of a return to large-scale conflict since the 2022 truce. That risk has now turned into a harsh reality.

Hans Grundberg, UN special envoy for Yemen, Security Council briefing, September 10, 2026

He was talking about Mocha, Taiz, and the Red Sea. Saada is in the same week’s military statements, not in that civilian displacement map. Taiz, Lahj, Aden, and Hodeidah hold the new camps. Qatabir’s burden is older, and it is measured in the police ledgers and in the repeated use of one hamlet’s name.

On October 2, Sanaa-based authorities said Saudi artillery had damaged homes in Munabbih, another Saada border district. Al Thabit was not in that round. It had been named four days earlier, and many times before that.