Yemen's Homeland Shield Forces say they are engaged in fierce battles with the Southern Giants Brigades to pursue remaining Houthi forces around Bab al-Mandab and fully secure the area, Al Arabiya reports

Ground operations around Bab al-Mandab carry a weight that most Yemen headlines do not, because the chokepoint is the transmission channel: past disruptions here have been priced through war-risk premia, re-routing around the Cape, container freight rates and tanker insurance rather than through the fighting itself. The relevant precedent from previous campaigns against Houthi positions is that territorial control and maritime threat have decoupled: even when forces on the ground have taken and held coastal terrain, the missile and drone capability that actually closes shipping lanes has proven dispersed, mobile and survivable, and attacks on shipping have resumed after declared clearances. The actor mapping matters here: the Giants Brigades are the established southern formation with prior form in coastal operations, while the named force and its command relationship are less well documented, so confirmation of who actually holds ground is itself a follow-on. The case distinction is between a genuine degradation of launch sites within range of the strait, which compresses insurance and freight premia, and a positional claim that leaves strike capacity intact, which historically has changed nothing for shipping schedules. The tells are carrier and liner behaviour, war-risk quotes on Red Sea transits, and whether Houthi spokesmen or maritime incident reporting confirm any change in attack tempo. A single factional claim of engagement, unverified, has on previous occasions moved nothing beyond the headline.