Thirteen-year-old Muneer Farie wanted to be his family's first teacher. Instead he sells socks outside a displacement camp in al-Shimayateen, Taiz, after Houthi forces pushed fighting into his village in al-Wazeyah district two weeks ago. His family fled with livestock and whatever they could carry, arriving penniless. His father, Ghaleb Farie, has asked both sons to work so the family can eat. Muneer joins 3.2 million Yemeni children whose education was already interrupted before this month's escalation. The Houthis launched a renewed military campaign in September, rapidly seizing towns along the Red Sea coast and shattering a UN-mediated ceasefire that had held since 2022. The group is now battling government forces and a Saudi air campaign for strategic highlands and supply lines on the outskirts of Taiz. More than 130,000 people have been displaced. Civilians are fleeing airstrikes and missiles, crowding into tent camps with no services. The fighting has severed the main road between the now Houthi-controlled port city of Mocha and government-held Taiz — the only road wide enough for large trucks and passenger buses. This is not a minor disruption. It is a chokepoint collapse. Basic goods no longer flow freely into the city, and commodity prices are spiking. Residents report giving up meat and shifting to cheaper foods. Essam Nabil, a 56-year-old carpenter in Taiz city, described the situation plainly: civilians bear the cost of military escalation, and Taiz is paying a disproportionate price. Schools are closing under direct fire. Abdulwasea Abdu, principal of Musaab Ibn Umayr school, kept his doors open as long as possible. That ended when a missile struck in view of 600-plus students two weeks ago, triggering panic and psychological trauma. The school is now shut, and Abdu sees fighting on three fronts — south, west, and north — with no prospect of resuming classes. He fears displaced children will be funneled into child labor, a pattern deeply entrenched in Yemen's decade-long war. The siege dynamics are familiar from 2015-2022: road closures, price spikes, displacement camps, child labor, and the slow erosion of every institution that keeps a society functional. Expatriates working in Saudi Arabia now face the same costly, circuitous journey through Aden that defined the early war years. The ceasefire's collapse means the brief window of normalcy — children in classrooms, roads open, prices manageable — is gone. What makes this escalation structurally dangerous is the speed of reversion. Two years of relative calm built fragile routines, not resilient systems. Schools reopened but had no blast protection. Roads carried commerce but had no alternative routes. Families returned to farming but had no savings buffer. The Houthi advance revealed that none of the underlying vulnerabilities had been addressed — the ceasefire was a pause, not a repair. The extraction runs in every direction. The Houthis extract territory and strategic position. Saudi airstrikes extract a military response at civilian cost. Displacement camps extract childhood from families who have no margin. And the severed Mocha-Taiz road extracts economic viability from an entire governorate. The people bearing all of these costs are the same: Yemeni civilians with no leverage over any of the armed actors shaping their lives.
