A Very Cheap Way of Waging War: What the Church Asks of Both Sides at the Gates of Taiz

On Sunday, Yemen’s internationally recognized government declared a war to take back every province the Houthis hold. The same weekend, Houthi fighters moved to close the last road into Taiz, a city of hundreds of thousands. Both sides speak the language of territory. The Church asks a different question first: who is allowed to bring in bread, water and fuel, and who is keeping them out.

The News Story

Yemen’s internationally recognized government announced on Sunday, October 4, 2026, a full-scale military campaign to recapture all territory held by the Iran-backed Houthi movement, including the capital, Sanaa. Rashad al-Alimi, chairman of the Presidential Leadership Council, made the declaration in a televised address delivered from Saudi Arabia. He said the offensive would continue “until the country is liberated from the grip of the terrorist militia” and that the decision came only after every chance to de-escalate had been exhausted. A government military spokesman later called on the Houthis to lay down their weapons.¹

Saudi Arabia is backing the campaign. Saudi military spokesman Maj. Gen. Turki al-Malki said the kingdom had the right to take all necessary measures to deter the rebels. According to Reuters and Axios, the Saudi role is mainly air power, with Yemeni troops fighting on the ground. Reuters reported that the plan calls for about 100,000 Yemeni soldiers; Axios put the number at tens of thousands. Hours before the announcement, government forces said they had struck “vital targets” in Sanaa and in Saada province, the Houthi stronghold on the Saudi border.²

The United States is providing intelligence and targeting support but has declined to join the fighting directly, U.S. officials told Axios. One official said Washington “is not going to take kinetic action for now,” while noting that could change if the operation runs into trouble. Saudi Defense Minister Prince Khalid bin Salman asked Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for U.S. airstrikes in a call on Thursday, according to another U.S. official.³

The announcement came as the Houthis pressed their own advance. In September, the group seized the Bab el-Mandeb Strait and roughly 90 miles of Red Sea coastline in a matter of weeks, gaining leverage over a shipping route that has grown more important since Iran choked traffic through the Strait of Hormuz during the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran that began in February. Over the weekend, Houthi fighters took hilltops near Taiz, Yemen’s third-largest city. Reports differ on how far they got. Reuters said they were advancing on the last road linking Taiz to Aden, the seat of the government. AFP, citing four security sources, said they had seized the al-Safiya area and already cut that road, effectively encircling a city where hundreds of thousands of civilians live.⁴

The Houthis answered the announcement with force. Their military spokesman, Yahya Saree, said they fired ballistic missiles and drones at Saudi Aramco facilities in Riyadh and at Khurais, about 90 miles southeast of the capital, and claimed the strikes caused major fires. He called them retaliation for about 50 Saudi-led air and missile strikes in Yemen over the previous 12 hours. Saudi Arabia did not immediately confirm the attacks, and the Houthis offered no evidence.⁵

The new fighting buries a truce agreed in 2022 that largely held until this year, when the Houthis began attacking Saudi shipping and oil infrastructure as the Iran war spilled over. The Houthis have held Sanaa and most of Yemen’s populous northwest since 2014, and the Saudi-led coalition that entered the war in 2015 failed to dislodge them. The World Food Program said last week that three in four families in parts of Yemen are going hungry because of the surge in fighting, which has already displaced tens of thousands of people.⁶

Catholic Social Teaching Analysis

Two Armies and One Road

On Sunday, two armies made plans for the same city. In a televised address from Saudi Arabia, Rashad al-Alimi promised to press the offensive “until the country is liberated from the grip of the terrorist militia.”⁷ Outside Taiz, Houthi fighters took hilltops along the last road to Aden, and four security sources told AFP they had already cut it off at al-Safiya.⁸ Taiz is Yemen’s third-largest city, home to hundreds of thousands of civilians, and the Houthis have besieged it for more than a decade.⁹

This war will be reported in maps: who holds which hill, which stretch of coast, which strait. The Church, however, reads it by a simpler measure. A woman in Taiz walks home with a gas cylinder balanced on her head, because fuel that should arrive by truck now arrives on foot. The World Food Program said last week that three in four families in parts of Yemen are going hungry.¹⁰ Whatever the generals decide this month, those families are the first people the Church asks about.

Bread That Belongs to the Hungry

The Church’s answer starts further back than any war, with the question of what the earth is for. The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church calls it the universal destination of goods: “God gave the earth to the whole human race for the sustenance of all its members, without excluding or favouring anyone.” The goods a person needs “to feed himself, grow, communicate, associate with others” are, it says, “absolutely indispensable.”¹¹ And this right comes first. The Compendium calls the common use of goods the “first principle of the whole ethical and social order” and teaches that it is a natural right with “priority with regard to any human intervention concerning goods, to any legal system concerning the same.”¹²

St. Thomas Aquinas tested that truth on the hardest case he could find. Asking whether a starving man may take bread that isn’t his, he answered that “things which are of human right cannot derogate from natural right or Divine right,” because “inferior things are ordained for the purpose of succoring man’s needs.” Then he quoted St. Ambrose: “It is the hungry man’s bread that you withhold.”¹³

The Second Vatican Council took the same conviction from the Fathers and aimed it at governments as well as at private men. “Since there are so many people prostrate with hunger in the world,” the Council wrote, “this sacred council urges all, both individuals and governments, to remember the aphorism of the Fathers, ‘Feed the man dying of hunger, because if you have not fed him, you have killed him.’”¹⁴

Set that aphorism beside the road to Aden. The Fathers aimed it at rich men sitting on full granaries. It lands with more force on an army that closes the one road a city’s food travels on.

A Very Cheap Way of Waging War

Pope Leo XIV has named the tactic outright. In his first message to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, in June 2025, he wrote, “We are currently witnessing with despair the iniquitous use of hunger as a weapon of war. Starving people to death is a very cheap way of waging war.” He described how it works in conflicts fought by armed groups more than by regular armies: “burning land and stealing livestock, blocking aid are tactics increasingly used by those who seek to control entire unarmed populations. Thus, in this type of conflict, the first military targets become water supply networks and communication routes.”¹⁵

Communication routes. A road from Taiz to Aden is exactly that, and Leo could have been describing the junction at al-Safiya this weekend. He also named who gains from it: “while civilians languish in misery, political leaders grow fat on the profits of the conflict.”¹⁶

The Catechism places all of this under the fifth commandment. It forbids “refusing assistance to a person in danger,” and it calls “the acceptance by human society of murderous famines, without efforts to remedy them,” a “scandalous injustice and a grave offense.” Those whose dealings “lead to the hunger and death of their brethren in the human family indirectly commit homicide.”¹⁷ If the Church says that much about greed and indifference, a siege that cuts a city’s supply road on purpose falls under the same judgment, and there’s nothing indirect about it.

The rule binds both sides of Yemen’s war, and a fair reader has to say so. The Houthis have squeezed Taiz for years, and this weekend they moved to close its last open road. In July, they declared what they call a naval blockade of Saudi Arabia and began attacking its shipping.¹⁸ The Saudi-led coalition has kept its own air and naval blockade on Houthi territory, and the 2022 truce collapsed in July when the Houthis set out to force that blockade open.¹⁹ Every one of those measures lands in the same kitchens. The principle stays the same whichever flag flies over the checkpoint.

What the Government May Do

Al-Alimi’s government has a real case, and the Church recognizes it. The Catechism teaches that “those holding legitimate authority have the right to repel by armed force aggressors against the civil community entrusted to their charge.”²⁰ Last month the Houthis took the Bab el-Mandeb Strait and some 90 miles of coast by force, and on Sunday they claimed new missile and drone strikes on Saudi oil sites.²¹ A government watching an armed movement close in on its third city is right to defend the people who live there.

Leo XIV has also narrowed the space in which that defense is judged, and the development matters here. In Magnifica Humanitas, his encyclical on artificial intelligence, he writes that, “without prejudice to the right to self-defense in the strictest sense,” the “just war” theory, “which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated.” Humanity, he says, has “far more effective and capable tools for promoting human life and resolving conflicts, such as dialogue, diplomacy and forgiveness.”²² Under the older tradition, a ruler weighed whether his war met the conditions of justice. Leo keeps the right of defense and asks every use of force to stay inside it. Breaking a siege so that Taiz can eat sits comfortably inside that space. A campaign to take every province by arms needs far more scrutiny.

Al-Alimi seemed to know it. “This is not a war against our people in Sanaa, Saada or any other province,” he said on Sunday.²³ Catholics can take him at his word and ask him to keep it, because most of Yemen’s people live in the northwest the Houthis hold.

In the same encyclical, Leo describes what happens to humanitarian law once war turns ordinary: “the protection of access to water, food and essential goods, and respect for the lives of civilians, especially children, come to be regarded as naïve relics of the past.”²⁴ That sentence is the test for Saudi pilots, for Yemeni brigades and for Houthi gunners alike. An offensive that reopens the road to Aden for food trucks passes it. A strike that closes a market or a fuel depot in Sanaa fails it, whatever its military logic.

What I’d Watch

Watch the road at al-Safiya. If it stays cut, Taiz is fully encircled, and the question of food stops being theoretical within weeks. Watch whether either side agrees to a corridor for aid, and whether the World Food Program’s next report on Yemen gets better or worse. And watch Washington, which is supplying intelligence and targeting support. A partner who helps choose targets shares the duty to keep bread off the list.

As always, our first response should be to pray. Pray for the woman carrying gas through the streets of Taiz, and for the families going to bed hungry tonight. Pray for President al-Alimi and for the Houthi commanders, that each comes to see the hungry on the other side of the line as his own people. And pray for the Missionaries of Charity, four of whom were murdered at their home for the elderly in Aden in 2016, and for everyone who still carries food into a country at war.

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This story turns on the universal destination of goods in wartime: the food, water and fuel a people needs to live belong to them first, and no army may make hunger its weapon.

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Notes

1. ↑ Mohammed Ghobari, Timour Azhari and Eman Abouhassira, “Yemeni government launches offensive to seize all areas from Iran-backed Houthis,” Reuters via Defense News, October 4, 2026, defensenews.com; “Yemen’s government declares a major operation against the Houthis, and other Mideast news,” Associated Press via Mesabi Tribune, October 4, 2026, mesabitribune.com; “Yemen’s government declares major military campaign against Houthis,” ABC News (Australia), from Reuters, October 5, 2026, abc.net.au.
2. ↑ Associated Press, “Yemen’s government declares a major operation”; Lior Ben Ari, “Yemen government launches major ground offensive as Houthis advance on Taiz,” Ynetnews, October 4, 2026, ynetnews.com; Barak Ravid, “Yemeni and Saudi forces launch counteroffensive against the Houthis,” Axios, October 4, 2026, axios.com; “Iran talking peace, but unwilling to bend to Trump, US nuclear demands,” Fox News, October 4, 2026, foxnews.com.
3. ↑ Ravid, “Yemeni and Saudi forces launch counteroffensive”; Ghobari, Azhari and Abouhassira, “Yemeni government launches offensive.”
4. ↑ Ghobari, Azhari and Abouhassira, “Yemeni government launches offensive”; Associated Press, “Yemen’s government declares a major operation”; Ben Ari, “Yemen government launches major ground offensive.”
5. ↑ Ghobari, Azhari and Abouhassira, “Yemeni government launches offensive”; Associated Press, “Yemen’s government declares a major operation”; Fox News, “Iran talking peace.”
6. ↑ Ghobari, Azhari and Abouhassira, “Yemeni government launches offensive”; Fox News, “Iran talking peace.”
7. ↑ Ghobari, Azhari and Abouhassira, “Yemeni government launches offensive.”
8. ↑ Ben Ari, “Yemen government launches major ground offensive.”
9. ↑ Associated Press, “Yemen’s government declares a major operation.”
10. ↑ Ghobari, Azhari and Abouhassira, “Yemeni government launches offensive.”
11. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), no. 171, vatican.va.
12. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, no. 172.
13. ↑ Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 66, a. 7, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, in New Advent, newadvent.org.
14. ↑ Second Vatican Council, Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes (December 7, 1965), no. 69, vatican.va.
15. ↑ Pope Leo XIV, Message to Participants in the 44th Session of the FAO Conference (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, June 30, 2025), vatican.va.
16. ↑ Pope Leo XIV, Message to the 44th Session of the FAO Conference.
17. ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 2269, vatican.va.
18. ↑ Fox News, “Iran talking peace.”
19. ↑ Ben Ari, “Yemen government launches major ground offensive.”
20. ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2265.
21. ↑ Ghobari, Azhari and Abouhassira, “Yemeni government launches offensive.”
22. ↑ Pope Leo XIV, Encyclical Letter Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, May 15, 2026), no. 192, vatican.va.
23. ↑ Ben Ari, “Yemen government launches major ground offensive.”
24. ↑ Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, no. 203.

Books Cited

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• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Latin-English edition, Complete Set (Aquinas Institute / Emmaus Academic, 2012)
• Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition (Doubleday / Image, 2003)