At least 30 people were killed and eight more wounded when a crowded market in southwestern Yemen was hit on Friday morning, in one of the deadliest attacks on civilians since fighting resumed between the Houthis and Saudi-backed government forces.
The strike hit the al-Hadara market in the al-Waziyah district of Taiz province at around 7 a.m. local time, just as the vegetable market was filling with shoppers at the peak of its morning trade. The toll was reported by Anees Alsabahi, a spokesman for the Houthi-run health ministry, who said the dead and wounded were civilians and warned the death toll was expected to rise.
Within hours, the two sides in Yemen’s war were blaming each other — and neither account could be independently confirmed.
Two accounts, no verification
The Houthis — the Iran-aligned movement that holds the capital, Sanaa, and much of northern Yemen — say Saudi warplanes carried out three airstrikes on the market. Their military spokesman, Brigadier General Yahya Saree, said the aircraft took off from the Khamis Mushait air base in southern Saudi Arabia and left Taiz province at about 8 a.m. He provided no evidence for the claim.
Saree warned on X that the attack would be answered. “These brutal crimes will not go unanswered and unpunished,” he wrote. The Houthi-run health ministry in Sanaa called the attack a “horrific crime” and demanded an independent international investigation into what it called Saudi Arabia’s “systematic targeting” of civilians.
Yemen’s internationally recognised government, which is backed by a Saudi-led coalition, offered a sharply different account. Its military spokesman, Colonel Majed al-Nazili, said the Houthis themselves had struck the market with ballistic missiles, calling it a war crime. The government-run Taiz local authority said its military operations room recorded no airstrikes in the district that day. The province’s government media office acknowledged in a statement that the busy market had been attacked and that there were casualties, but gave no toll of its own.
The Associated Press said it could not independently verify either side’s claims. Al Jazeera said the same. Saudi Arabia’s information ministry did not respond to the news agency’s requests for comment, and the Saudi-led coalition issued no statement on the market attack — though on the same day it did announce interceptions of Houthi missiles and drones near Najran and the Mecca region.
A contested front, and a pattern
The market sits in al-Waziiya, a district in western Taiz where fighting has been going on for weeks. Al Jazeera’s correspondent in Sanaa, Yousef Mawry, reported that clashes were continuing in the district at the time of the attack. Taiz province has been one of the most bitterly contested fronts of the war, and the renewed fighting there has displaced hundreds of thousands of people in recent months.
The strike is not an isolated incident. A strike on another market in Taiz province on 27 September killed seven people and wounded 40, according to Reuters. Attribution of attacks on civilian areas in the province has repeatedly been disputed and never conclusively settled — a pattern that leaves the dead uncounted by any neutral party. As of Saturday, no United Nations agency, the Red Cross, or the Yemeni civilian-harm monitor Mwatana had issued a statement on the incident, and no independent investigation had been announced.
The attack comes a month after Yemen’s government launched Operation Dawn of Yemen, a ground offensive backed by coalition air support aimed at retaking Houthi-held territory. The offensive followed months of escalation in which the Houthis have fired missiles and drones at Saudi airports and oil facilities — including the deadliest strike on Saudi soil in over a decade at Riyadh airport in October — while Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates patched up their rift over Yemen to back the government side together.
Why this matters
Markets are where this war meets ordinary life. Al-Hadara was full of shoppers buying vegetables on a Friday morning, not a military target by either side’s own description of it. Yet the dispute over who fired has already overtaken the fact that 30 civilians are dead — and because no independent investigators can reach the site, the question may never be answered to anyone’s satisfaction. That fog is itself the story: in Taiz, civilian deaths are claimed, denied and reclaimed within hours, while the people caught underneath are buried before the world learns their names. Saree’s promise of retaliation points to what comes next. The Houthis have been striking Saudi airports and oil facilities daily, and a fresh round of fire would deepen a war that, after a month of renewed offensive, is already displacing families across the province faster than aid agencies can track them.
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