The Houthis say they have recruited thousands of people to their armed forces since October 7, 2023, and activists report the armed group recruiting children as young as 13, Human Rights Watch said today. Recruiting children younger than 15 is a war crime.

On October 10, Abdul Malik al-Houthi, the leader of the Houthi movement, also known as Ansar Allah, made a speech in which he called for people to be ready to defend Palestine, in response to the atrocities carried out during the hostilities between Israeli forces and Palestinian armed groups in Gaza since October 7. Though the Houthis have systematically recruited children in Yemen since at least 2009, child recruitment by the Houthis has increased noticeably in the last few months amid the hostilities in Gaza, activists said.

“The Houthis are exploiting the Palestinian cause to recruit more children for their domestic fight in Yemen,” said Niku Jafarnia, Yemen and Bahrain researcher at Human Rights Watch. “The Houthis should be investing resources into providing the basic needs of children in their territories like good education, food, and water, rather than replacing their childhood with conflict.”

Human Rights Watch spoke with five human rights activists and individuals working with civil society organizations across Yemen, who confirmed a significant increase in child recruitment in recent months.

One woman who leads a human rights-focused nongovernmental organization said: “The Houthis make children believe that they will fight to liberate Palestine, but they end up sending them to [the front lines in] Marib and Taizz. Indeed, the Houthis’ Gaza is Marib [a Yemeni city with oil resources Houthis have repeatedly attacked].” The Houthis have also unlawfully besieged the northeastern city of Taizz since 2015, in which they have blocked water and humanitarian aid from reaching civilians.

On November 16, during a graduation ceremony for the first group of military recruits since October 7, the Houthis announced that they would form new military brigades to carry out al-Houthi's October 10 directive.

A member of the Houthis’ political office, Houtham Assad, told various media outlets: “As for the general mobilization in support of our people in the Gaza Strip ... training camps were opened, tens of thousands of young people volunteered to study military craft, [and] several groups have already graduated in various provinces of Yemen.”

Over the last three months, the Houthis have recruited more than 70,000 new fighters, they have said, including from the governorates of Dhamar, Sanaa, Saada, Ammran, Hajja, and Hodeida.

While it is unclear how many of the new recruits have been children, several activists and experts working on issues related to child recruitment told Human Rights Watch that the vast majority of recruits are ages 13 to 25, including at least hundreds or thousands who are younger than 18. News releases about their recent recruitment published by the Houthis’ official news outlet, SabaNet, show people who appear to be children.

The Houthis have recruited thousands of children since the start of the conflict in Yemen in 2014. The United Nations has verified at least 1,851 individual cases of child recruitment or use by the Houthis since 2010. According to Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor and SAM Organization for Rights and Liberties, a Yemeni civil society organization, the Houthis recruited over 10,000 children between 2014 and 2021. The Yemeni government has also recruited children throughout the conflict despite an action plan to end child recruitment that they signed with the UN in 2014.

The UN secretary-general has included the Houthis in his annual list of groups responsible for grave violations against children in armed conflict every year since 2011. He initially listed the Houthis for their recruitment and use of child soldiers, and since 2016 has also listed them for killing and maiming children and for attacks against schools and hospitals.

In 2022, the Houthis signed an action plan with the UN to end grave violations against children, including the recruitment and use of children in their forces, and committed to releasing all children from their forces within six months.

Tawfik al-Hamidi, the president of SAM, told Human Rights Watch that the Houthis use their government institutions in their efforts to recruit children, including the Ministries of Education, Interior, and Defense. “All of them are working together and coordinate to mobilize children and recruit them,” he said.

Another activist, who works as a human rights researcher, said that “[recruitment] activities in schools have increased massively [since October 7], including through the school scouts. They take students from schools to their culture centers where they lecture children about the Jihad and send them to military camps and front lines.”