Yemen's grinding civil war erupted into one of its bloodiest stretches in years over the weekend, with government forces claiming they killed or wounded more than 1,500 Houthi fighters in a single 24-hour span around the city of Taiz, while the Iran-aligned rebels struck back with a missile-and-drone attack they say hit a Saudi Aramco facility near Riyadh.

Colonel Majed Abdullah al-Nazili, a spokesman for Yemen's internationally recognized armed forces, said troops carried out 257 "precision targeting operations" on Saturday using warplanes, drones, artillery, missiles and rocket launchers, killing at least 700 Houthi fighters and destroying 170 combat vehicles. That followed roughly 474 strikes a day earlier that the army says left 1,540 Houthis dead or wounded, according to Al Jazeera and Middle East Eye. The casualty figures, supplied by the Yemeni military, have not been independently verified.

Fight for Taiz

The fiercest fighting is centered on Taiz, Yemen's third-largest city and a resistance stronghold that has withstood Houthi sieges since 2015. Rather than a frontal assault, the rebels are pushing to sever the main highway linking Taiz to the port city of Aden, encircling government-held districts, The National reported. A UN-brokered truce that had held since 2022 collapsed in July, and fighting has escalated sharply since mid-September, when the Houthis advanced along Yemen's western coast near the port of Mocha.

"If the Houthis continue to intensify their attacks and try to capture Taiz, it is likely to cost them heavily in both fighters and time," Crisis Group analyst Ahmed Nagi told The National, while warning that seizing the city would give the rebels "a much clearer path to push further south."

The human toll is mounting alongside the body count. The World Food Programme found that 74% of households in accessible parts of Taiz cannot meet basic food needs — the highest level recorded this year — as fighting drives up prices and chokes off aid routes. Nearly 100,000 displaced people are now sheltering across 15 districts of the province, the highest concentration of any region in the country.

On the Saudi side of the border, the Houthis claimed a retaliatory strike with "ballistic missiles and drones" on an Aramco facility near Riyadh, with spokesman Yahya Saree saying it caused fires at the site. The Saudi-led coalition dismissed the claim as "misleading," with spokesman Turki al-Maliki accusing the rebels of trying "to divert attention from the scale of the losses and the growing public anger against them," according to Al Jazeera's reporting from the region.

Riyadh, meanwhile, is weighing a far larger military response. Pakistan has already sent air-defense systems, drones and anti-drone equipment to bolster Yemeni government forces, and Saudi Arabia is said to be preparing a major offensive with multiple options on the table, according to The National. With Taiz's defenders digging in and Riyadh signaling it is done absorbing cross-border strikes, the next 24 to 48 hours could determine whether this flare-up becomes the war's next major turning point — or its bloodiest stalemate yet.