The terror group has effectively declared war on the United Nations in Yemen. It’s up to donor countries to force the UN to see that reality.
At the end of October, the Iran-backed Houthi government’s acting foreign minister, Abdulwahid Abu Ras, announced that 43 UN personnel detained by the Houthis will stand trial over alleged assistance to Israel. Supposedly, these UN staffers supported the Israeli August 28 airstrike that killed at least 12 officials in the Houthi-controlled government. In the following days, the Houthis rounded up additional Yemeni civilians, not connected to the UN, on espionage allegations, claiming these individuals worked for a Saudi-Israeli-American spy network.
Since then, the Houthis have sentenced 17 individuals to death for espionage at the behest of Saudi Arabia, the United States, and Israel. While reports differ on whether or not those sentences are in fact the UN employees, this verdict shows the threat that the illegally detained UN personnel face.
Allegations against the United Nations don’t stop with these individuals. Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, the Yemeni group’s chief, claimed that the UN’s operations in Yemen, in particular the World Food Programme (WFP) and UNICEF, are actually espionage cells working at the behest of the Israelis and Americans. This is an interesting allegation considering the UN’s well-documented bias against Israel.
On October 18, the spokesperson for UN leader Antonio Guterres said, “the Secretary-General is gravely concerned by the continued public accusations made by the Houthis.” Unfortunately for UN personnel in Yemen, Guterres’s grave concern has failed to deter Houthi harassment.
On the same day, the Houthis raided a UN compound in Sanaa, this time detaining 15 international staffers and at least five other local Yemeni employees. The terror group has since released the detained individuals and permitted 12 of the foreign workers to depart Yemen, with the other three free to move. However, it went on to detain two more UN employees just days later.
The Houthis have been conducting these arbitrary detentions for years. In 2021, the Houthis detained Yemeni former employees of the US Embassy in Sanaa, which closed in 2015, and have been holding them ever since. Notably, in January 2025, the group illegally detained eight UN personnel, one of whom ultimately died in Houthi custody. At the end of August, the Houthis launched another campaign against UN workers in which the Iran-backed group kidnapped at least 18 personnel.
In total, the Houthis held 59 illegally detained staffers as of October 30, according to the world body. And their harassment hasn’t stopped.
The primary victims of the Houthis’ anti-UN campaigns have been staff hired locally who, regrettably, have few advocates. In contrast to Yemenis detained for prolonged periods in horrible conditions, a Jordanian national rounded up in the Houthis’ August 31 raid, for example, was returned to her country on September 11.
In truth, the allegations of espionage against UN and other humanitarian personnel are not new—they have often been the Houthis’ justification for arrests. However, Abdul-Malik’s aggressive attacks on the international body and its programs, coupled with the increasing rate of illegal detentions, indicate an escalating threat.
Despite this, the secretary-general’s special envoy for Yemen sat down with the group’s negotiators in Oman to beg for the return of UN staff kidnapped by the Houthis. The UN, which often brushes off attacks on its personnel as the price of doing business in a dangerous neighborhood, attempts to engage with the Houthis as if they were conventional actors, not an Iran-backed terror group.
Countries that support UN efforts in Yemen, chief among them the United States, must force changes in the international body’s efforts. If the UN continues its activities in Yemen without reform, employees will remain in harm’s way.
Donors should immediately require the UN to relocate all headquarters to Aden, where the internationally recognized government sits. Local workers, who have been such a common target of the Houthis, should also be moved if possible. From there, the UN can determine how to deliver humanitarian assistance to the communities in desperate need in Houthi-controlled Yemen. No further humanitarian assistance should be routed through the Red Sea port of Hodeidah, which Houthi attacks—and military provocation of the Israelis—have made unsafe for shipping.
But while these steps may alleviate some concerns in the interim, a solution can only be found in the complete overhaul of UN operations in Yemen with the goal of assisting people in need without enabling or empowering the Houthis. The UN cannot be trusted to accomplish this reform on its own; instead, donor countries should lead a reevaluation of UN efforts and oversee the implementation of reforms.
About the Authors: Bridget Toomey and Edmund Fitton-Brown
Bridget Toomey is a research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). Prior to joining FDD, she was a Fulbright Fellow in Israel where she completed an MA in security and diplomacy at Tel Aviv University. During her undergraduate studies, she interned for American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project, focusing on jihadi terror groups, and for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. She holds a BA in government with a minor in modern Middle Eastern studies from Harvard. Follow Bridget on X @BridgetKToomey.
Edmund Fitton-Brown is a senior fellow at FDD. He is a former UK ambassador to Yemen and former UN coordinator. Edmund joined the UK foreign service in 1984 and served in Finland, Egypt, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Italy, and the United Arab Emirates, finishing this phase of his career as British ambassador to Yemen in 2015–2017. He then joined the United Nations for five years, serving as coordinator of the Security Council team responsible for sanctions and threat assessment on ISIS, al-Qaeda, and the Taliban. He subsequently worked as a senior adviser to the Counter Extremism Project. Edmund has featured in a range of specialist and mainstream publications, including West Point’s CTC Sentinel, FDD’s Long War Journal, The New York Times, the BBC, The Times, The Telegraph, and The Daily Mail, El Mundo, Al-Sharq al-Awsat, and The National. Follow Edmund on X @EFittonBrown.
Image: Mohammad al-Wafi / Shutterstock.com.
