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After more than two years of relative calm across Yemen, large-scale violence has re-erupted, as the Houthi movement has launched a wave of fresh missile and drone strikes against government-held territories that have left civilians dead, injured, and displaced, while forcing a key strategic port to halt all commercial operations. According to Yemeni government officials and multiple regional media reports, the latest escalation of hostilities has shattered the informal truce that had largely held across most of the country since April 2022, with fighting spreading across four key provinces in recent weeks.

Authorities in Marib Governorate confirmed that over the weekend, Houthi forces launched six ballistic missiles and four unmanned aerial drones targeting residential neighborhoods in the densely populated provincial capital of Marib. The governorate’s media office stated that the strikes wounded at least four civilians and caused extensive damage to private homes, civilian vehicles, and other civilian infrastructure. One of the projectiles directly hit a local bakery in the al-Sharika district, located just north of Marib city, leaving one baker with serious injuries. Photographs released by the governorate after the attack show a large impact crater in a residential neighborhood and the burned wreckage of a civilian vehicle damaged in the strike.

Officials have emphasized that the ongoing offensive puts not just local residents at risk, but also the thousands of displaced Yemenis who have sought shelter in camps across Marib Governorate, which has long been a safe haven for people fleeing violence in other parts of the country. The Marib media office has issued an urgent appeal to the global community, calling for immediate condemnation of what it describes as deliberate crimes against civilian populations, displacement camps, and civilian infrastructure, and urging the international community to formally document these attacks as violations of international humanitarian law. The strikes on Marib match earlier reports of multiple missile and drone attacks targeting civilian sites across the province, which were confirmed by both Yemen’s state-run Saba TV and government-aligned Aljoumhouria TV, which reported widespread explosions across the city over the weekend.

Further south, repeated Houthi attacks on the Red Sea port city of Mocha have forced a full suspension of all commercial and maritime operations at the strategic facility, according to port director Abdulmalik al-Sharabi. Sharabi told Yemen’s state-run Saba news agency that the strikes have killed seven people: four security personnel assigned to protect the port and three civilian port employees. Total economic damage from the attacks is estimated at $16 million, he added.

Located in southwestern Taiz province just off the Bab al-Mandab Strait, a key global shipping chokepoint connecting the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, Mocha port has faced more than 25 missile strikes since August 9. This marks the first time the facility has been targeted since the 2022 truce went into effect. The attacks damaged six wooden commercial fishing vessels and a large dredger that was being used for a port expansion project designed to increase the facility’s capacity to receive critical humanitarian and commercial shipments. With all operations halted, approximately 1,300 port workers have been left without any source of income, Sharabi said. Just days earlier, the government-aligned National Resistance Forces reported that Houthi forces had launched 40 ballistic missiles, 46 drones, and several explosive-laden boats targeting Mocha, its port, and surrounding civilian sites in the preceding week.

Houthi officials have pushed back on government claims, stating that their strikes only targeted legitimate military objectives: military gatherings, weapons storage depots, and military vessels operating in the area around Mocha.

The resurgence of violence has not been limited to Marib and Mocha. Clashes have also intensified in southwestern Taiz province, where Yemeni military officials reported that three Houthi fighters were killed and multiple others, including senior field commanders, were wounded in a Yemeni army drone strike on Saturday. A military source told Saba TV that the drone attack targeted Houthi personnel and vehicles on the Maqbanah front, located west of Taiz city.

In the weeks since the relative calm that followed the 2022 truce collapsed, fighting has intensified across Marib, al-Jawf, al-Dhalea, and Taiz, undoing most of the progress toward stability that the truce had enabled.

Yemen’s nearly decade-long conflict began in September 2014, when Houthi forces seized the capital Sanaa and large swathes of northern and western Yemen, forcing the internationally recognized Yemeni government into exile. The ensuing conflict has dragged Yemen into what the United Nations has repeatedly described as one of the world’s worst humanitarian and economic crises, with more than 21 million Yemenis in need of humanitarian assistance and millions facing acute food insecurity.

Rashad al-Alimi, chairman of Yemen’s internationally backed Presidential Leadership Council, warned that the recent attacks on Mocha port pose a direct threat to regional shipping traffic and to the flow of critical food and fuel supplies into Yemen, a country that relies on imports for more than 90 percent of its food. The disruption of port operations, he said, threatens to push Yemen’s already catastrophic food crisis even further.

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia – The global community of genocide historians and human rights advocates is mourning the passing of Bou Meng, the last of the seven known survivors of the Khmer Rouge’s notorious S-21 torture and execution center, who died at 85 from age-related complications late last Friday.

Bou Meng’s survival was tied directly to his artistic skill: captured during one of the Khmer Rouge regime’s violent internal purges after the group seized power in 1975, he was spared execution only because his captors realized he could paint propaganda portraits of then-leader Pol Pot and other communist figures. Detained at S-21 – the converted Phnom Penh high school better known today as Tuol Sleng – from 1977 until the regime fell in 1979, Bou Meng spent nearly two years creating propaganda art for his jailers while most of his fellow detainees were tortured and killed.

The Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, implementing radical agrarian socialist policies that left an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians dead from mass executions, starvation, forced labor, and systemic medical neglect. Over the nearly four years S-21 operated, roughly 16,000 men, women, and children were held there before being killed; only seven people are confirmed to have survived the facility. Today, the site stands as the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, a permanent memorial to the regime’s atrocities.

In 2009, Bou Meng joined two other surviving S-21 detainees – fellow artist Vann Nath and mechanic Chum Mey – to testify before the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, a UN-backed special tribunal convened to prosecute senior Khmer Rouge leaders for genocide and crimes against humanity. Their testimony was central to the 2010 conviction of Kaing Guek Eav, better known by his alias Duch, the commandant of S-21. Duch was found guilty of torture, murder, and crimes against humanity, sentenced to life in prison, and died in custody in 2020 at 77.

During his testimony, Bou Meng detailed how his artistic commissions saved his life, describing the large-scale propaganda works he was forced to complete for the regime. “I was ordered to paint a picture of Ho Chi Minh’s head on the body of a dog,” he told the tribunal, referencing the Khmer Rouge’s deep hostility toward neighboring Vietnam, which ultimately invaded in 1979 to oust the regime. His first oversize portrait of Pol Pot took three months to finish, after which Duch ordered additional portraits of Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, Kim Il Sung, and the mocking depiction of Ho Chi Minh.

Bou Meng joined the Khmer Rouge during its 1970–1975 insurgency against the U.S.-backed Cambodian government, but fell victim to the regime’s paranoia-driven internal purges shortly after the group took power. He endured brutal torture before being assigned to his painting duties, and lost his entire first family to the regime’s violence: his first wife was arrested alongside him, disappeared from S-21, and is presumed executed, while his two young children were taken to rural work camps and never seen again, likely killed. After the regime fell, Bou Meng remarried and rebuilt his life.

In a statement Sunday, Youk Chhang, director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia – an organization that has amassed one of the world’s most extensive archives of Khmer Rouge atrocity records – called Bou Meng a critical voice for justice whose legacy will endure. “Bou Meng’s life journey for justice has been documented and will not be forgotten by genocide history around the world,” he wrote in a text message to the Associated Press. He also called for renewed action to preserve the stories of remaining Khmer Rouge survivors, and to expand access to physical and mental health support for the millions who lived through the regime’s rule.

In his final decades, Bou Meng was a regular presence at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, where he greeted visitors and sold copies of his memoir recounting his experience of survival and trauma.

On the day after a powerful magnitude 7.7 earthquake struck eastern Indonesia’s Flores Island, search and rescue teams returned to the field Sunday, digging through crumbled structures and landslide rubble to recover victims and locate any trapped survivors. As of Sunday’s official update, the disaster has left at least 47 people dead, more than 100 injured, and thousands displaced from their homes.

Official casualty breakdown from Indonesia’s National Disaster Management Agency confirms 24 fatalities in Manggarai regency and 17 in adjacent East Manggarai, with additional deaths recorded across Sikka, Ngada and Ende regencies. Rescuers are still working to reach communities potentially buried under quake-triggered landslides that have impacted six regencies across the island, which is a majority-Catholic region in the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation.

According to the United States Geological Survey (USGS), the seismic event originated 68 kilometers north-northwest of Ende, in East Nusa Tenggara province, at a shallow depth of roughly 10 kilometers off Flores’ coastline. Shaking was felt across most of the island, sending panicked residents running for open ground, and tremors were also detected as far as neighboring West Nusa Tenggara and portions of southern Sulawesi.

Preliminary damage assessments count more than 900 homes completely destroyed and nearly 450 others partially damaged, forcing approximately 5,000 displaced people to seek safety in government-run temporary shelters. Thousands more chose to spend Saturday night in open outdoor spaces, rather than returning to structurally compromised properties out of fear of powerful aftershocks. At least 167 public infrastructure sites, including local schools, community health centers and churches, have also sustained damage.

The quake also impacted Labuan Bajo, the main entry point for the world-famous Komodo National Park, one of Indonesia’s top international tourist destinations. A series of landslides blocked multiple segments of the Trans-Flores Highway, a 700-kilometer corridor that connects scattered communities across the mountainous island.

For many residents like Anastasia Imad, a farmer based in Labuan Bajo who is now staying in a makeshift green tent pitched next to her damaged home, the horror of the quake remains fresh. “The shaking was terrifying, so intense that my house nearly collapsed,” Imuda explained. “We feared the aftershocks would bring it down on us while we slept.”

Emergency response teams have already begun distributing critical life-saving supplies, including rice, pre-prepared meals, clean drinking water, blankets and essential medications, while work continues to erect additional temporary shelters for displaced residents. Local authorities note that restoring downed power and telecommunications networks, alongside delivering aid to remote villages cut off by landslides, remain the most pressing challenges facing the response effort.

By Sunday, rescue crews had cleared most landslide debris and reopened access to many previously cut-off villages, though ongoing communication failures and blackouts continue to slow search operations, according to Fathur Rahman, head of the Search and Rescue Office in Maumere, Sikka’s capital. He added that teams are currently prioritizing searches through collapsed residential and commercial building rubble for any remaining potential victims.

Indonesia, an archipelago nation made up of more than 17,000 islands, sits along the Pacific “Ring of Fire”, a geologically active horseshoe-shaped network of seismic faults and volcanic systems that makes the country extremely prone to large earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Flores has a long history of deadly seismic disasters: a 1992 quake and subsequent tsunami killed roughly 2,500 people on the island. More recently, a 2018 magnitude 7.5 quake on Sulawesi triggered a tsunami that claimed more than 4,400 lives, and the 2004 magnitude 9.1 quake off the coast of Sumatra unleashed a devastating Indian Ocean tsunami that killed approximately 230,000 people across a dozen coastal nations.

This report was compiled with additional contribution from Associated Press writers Niniek Karmini and Edna Tarigan in Jakarta.