In Aden, Yemen's temporary capital, a local TV anchor took off his tie live on air and announced that journalists would no longer wear formal suits. The situation, he said, demanded that formalities be dropped, because the country was entering open war. One gesture in front of the camera said more than every diplomatic statement of the past four years.

The trigger was Yemeni President Rashad al-Alimi's decision to declare a general military operation against the Houthi rebels. The goal, in the official wording, is to liberate the entire territory and restore state authority. A state of war and general mobilisation have been declared, and the armed forces and all state institutions have been placed on full alert.

Taiz encircled

The spark was Al-Safiya. The rebels seized that key district, took over the police station and cut the main road linking besieged Taiz to Aden. With that, Taiz is completely surrounded. In the last 24 hours alone, more than 70 people were killed in fierce fighting around the city.

Then came the numbers, and this is where it pays to read carefully. Yemeni armed forces spokesman Colonel Majid Abdullah al-Nazili claims government units carried out 257 precision strikes and that at least 700 rebels were killed. That is a figure the army is giving for its own offensive - nobody independent has counted the dead. The Saudi-led military coalition said it carried out 97 air and artillery strikes on Houthi reinforcements on the fronts near Tor al-Baha and Taiz, and air strikes were also reported in the northern provinces of Al-Jawf and Saada, as well as in the capital Sanaa.

The Houthis responded with a statement of their own. Their spokesman Yahya Saree announced that the rebels had fired ballistic missiles and drones at Saudi Aramco facilities in Riyadh and the Khurais area. Riyadh has not yet officially confirmed this. In war, the first casualty is verifiability - each side counts only its own victories.

How the truce died in instalments

The new escalation marks the end of the relative truce that had held since 2022. It didn't die overnight. Fighting flared up again in July, after the Houthis allowed an Iranian plane to land in Sanaa. September brought the game-changer: the rebels seized the Red Sea coast, the Bab el-Mandeb strait and the port of Mocha.

With that, the Houthis imposed a naval blockade on Saudi Arabia and closed off its alternative oil export routes. Riyadh had no choice but to go straight back into a war that has been running since 2014. The truce turned out to be a pause to reload, not a road to peace.

The Balkans know this scene by heart: a ceasefire everyone calls peace, while both sides prepare for the next round. When news anchors start dressing for war, the question is no longer whether, but for how long. How many more civilians will be trapped in Taiz before anyone sits down at a table?