Manufacturing Obedience in the Name of Gaza: The Reality Behind the Mass Rallies in Houthi areas
How the Houthis turned Gaza solidarity into a compulsory roll-call of loyalty in Yemen.
Image from Houthi media of a march by school students in the capital, Sana'a on August 5, 2025 under the title: “From the students of Yemen to the children of Gaza... A promise that won’t be broken, and loyalty until victory
On August 5, the Houthis orchestrated a mass rally in Sana’a titled “From the students of Yemen to the children of Gaza... a promise that won’t be broken.” Footage shows children in uniform and adults in tribal dress marching through the streets, with BDS slogans and banners calling the U.S. the great Satan. Slogans were shouted, flags were raised, and pre-approved speeches promised blood and sacrifice. It wasn’t a protest—it was a pledge. The event was marketed as a gesture of solidarity with Gaza, but its structure, symbols, and speakers revealed something else: a display of totalitarian choreography masquerading as compassion
The Iran-backed Houthis want the world to believe that Yemen is marching in solidarity with Gaza, united in range against the West with no other concern in sight. Hundreds of thousands in the square in marches that grip our attention. Their drone footage, shared across their media channels, shows massive crowds chanting in unison, waving Palestinian flags, calling for jihad. These images appear on front pages and evening broadcasts in pro-Houthi media, creating the impression of popular, voluntary solidarity. However, the reality behind the spectacle is something entirely different.
The front page of the Houthis’ militia-run newspaper, al-Thawra, doesn’t lead with grief or solidarity. It leads with a battle cry: “Ready to confront any aggression and foil any treacherous conspiracy.” This isn’t about Israel or the U.S. alone. It’s about framing the entire world, including dissenting Yemenis, as part of a hostile plot. The enemy is both foreign and internal. In this logic, anyone who refuses to chant, march, or comply becomes a traitor. Through this demonstration, the Houthis aim to appear as though they are manufacturing consent and legitimacy for their cause, when in fact they are clearly fostering paranoia, channeled into mass displays of loyalty. These rallies don’t just express outrage. They rehearse obedience. What the Houthis are building isn’t resistance; it would be a mistake to see it as such. It’s a fortress isolated state that is easily exploited, ideologically sealed, emotionally blackmailed, and permanently mobilized for a war that never ends.
Screenshot of al-Thawara newspaper with the title “Ready to confront any aggression and thwart any conspiracy.
What you see in the public squares is calibrated displays of power. The chants, the flags, and the synchronized fists in the air are part of a performance meant to overwhelm, signal absolute control, and intimidate anyone watching. There is no freedom of expression in Houthi-controlled areas, only political coercion, staged in a square controlled by a militia that decides who shows up, what they shout, and when they’re allowed to leave. The Houthis aren’t measuring passion. They’re measuring obedience. They are counting bodies, not hearts.
Attendance at these "million-man marches" isn't really optional; it’s decreed. The order comes from the very top. In a televised speech on July 3, 2025, Abdulmalik al-Houthi, the group’s leader, called on the Yemeni people to march in the capital and other governorates in a show of jihad 'for the Sake of Allah' and in support of the Palestinian people. He praised previous mass demonstrations as evidence of Yemen’s divine alignment with the path of resistance. In Houthi-run areas, this is not a suggestion.
The Leader’s Orders: March for Jihad, Not Humanity
In Abdulmalik al-Houthis’ own words, as published on July 3, 2025, the march and attendance in the public square to support Gaza was a divine obligation. He described Yemen’s alignment with Gaza as a ‘sacred responsibility,’ urging all Muslim peoples to follow Yemen’s example of jihad, ‘enjoining what is right and forbidding what is wrong’ according to his speech. The implication was unmistakable: the square was not just a site of protest, but a stage for religious obedience. To refuse to march was not just disobedience or dissent, but heresy. To put it more bluntly, this wasn’t a call to protest in solidarity with Gaza; it was a call to fall in line with divine marching orders
Houthi-run SABA News amplifies Abdulmalik al-Houthi’s call for a “million-man march” in support of Palestinian resistance and jihad “for the sake of Allah.” The language collapses national solidarity into religious warfare, framing Yemen’s alignment with Hamas and Iran as a divine mandate.
What ensues in a militia-controlled state is obedience: University deans get quotas by department to have students attend the demonstrations. Civil servants have their attendance monitored through sign-in sheets. Tribal leaders deliver village headcounts and show of solidarity as an offering of loyalty. Skip the rally, and you might face anything from salary cuts to mandatory "re-education" and prison. The whole thing is staged: huge flags stretch across plazas to make crowds look denser from drone height, loudspeakers blast pre-approved slogans mixing religious language with military rhetoric. The Houthis call it general mobilization, but it's closer to theater; each rally functions as a kind of state census disguised as solidarity.
There’s nothing principled about what the Houthis are doing. They’ve turned nearly everyone into an enemy, Yemenis who are not in their areas are immediately enemies, Sunni scholars, neighboring states, and even civilians who refuse to perform loyalty on demand. Their cause isn’t Yemen, and it isn’t Palestine. It’s obedience to Tehran, to power, to themselves. What they call faith is coercion. What they claim is solidarity is really submission. The slogans are loud, but the goal is quiet, brutal, and simple: control.
This didn't start with Gaza. It builds on years of gradual militarization that really picked up around 2020 when the Houthis became increasingly exposed as Iranian proxies. What Yemenis observed first was children and teenagers getting conscripted through "summer camps." Then educators. Then doctors and hospital staff. Now, even students at religious academies are being counted and deployed to these squares.
In official coverage (Video attached below,) student participation is framed not as support but as a sacred military posture. One speaker at a rally declared: ‘We are ready to turn our necks into bridges to deliver aid to Gaza.’ Another proclaimed, ‘At the leader’s signal, we are ready for battle.’ These aren’t chants of solidarity; they are pledges of obedience, framed in divine language and backed by threats against anyone who stays home. ‘May God curse every coward,’ one orator warned, making it clear: neutrality is heresy.
Here's where it gets particularly absurd: professors are being put through mandatory combat training. Yemeni journalist Fares Alhemyari pointed to how the Houthis are forcing educators and doctors into indoctrination sessions and into learning to use Kalashnikovs and RPGs. These training sessions often conclude with field trips to Houthi shrines, where participants pledge their loyalty to the leadership. Only then can they go back to their lecture halls. The classroom and the battlefield aren't separate anymore.
Since seizing Sana'a in 2014, the Houthis have killed opponents, imprisoned thousands of Yemenis as political prisoners, and gone after activists, journalists, and anyone who dares challenge them. They've issued over 400 death sentences, with dozens dying under torture in their prisons. Human Rights Watch has documented their systematic use of torture to extract confessions, while hundreds of human rights defenders, activists, and journalists remain disappeared or detained. As I've documented before, the Houthis have been reshaping Yemen under their control according to a radical ideology, building a strategic alliance with Iran that turns Yemen into a launching pad for regional chaos. The message is clear: dissent gets you killed.
The targeting goes beyond random arrests. Houthi strategically detain aid workers, and have systematically detained educators, forcing them to appear on controlled media platforms and present themselves as "spies" through coerced confessions. The brutal tactics include cases like Mohammed Naji Khamash, who died under alleged torture, and Dr. Mohammed Hatim Al-Mikhlafi, currently detained. This campaign aims to silence dissent, dismantle knowledge, and weaponize education in service of hardline ideology; ensuring that any potential source of alternative thinking is eliminated through intimidation, imprisonment, or death.
For the Houthis, the Gaza war is a gift to them. Beneath the chants of solidarity lies a dual agenda: aligning more closely with Iran’s regional posture while deepening control at home. Their attacks on Israel over the past few years have made one thing clear: this is not about Palestinian liberation. It is about advancing a sectarian empire project, with Yemenis cast as foot soldiers in Iran’s ideological war. In this narrative, even Yemeni lives - including children- become expendable. Their blood is treated as proof of devotion, a sacred offering in a war framed as divine. Mobilization, then, is not just about optics; it is a militia-wide loyalty test: who obeys, who resists, who’s next to be conscripted. It also provides ideological cover for authoritarian expansion. Every campaign pushes the militia further into civilian life, encompassing education, healthcare, telecommunications, and even finance. The rallies are just the surface. The public rallies are just the visible part of a much broader power grab. The deeper transformation is quieter, more corrosive, and far harder to reverse.
Loyalty to the Axis, Not Justice for Gaza
While they rarely release official numbers, Houthi media reported mass mobilization in over 80 locations in Taiz governorate alone, with similar demonstrations in Sanaʿa, Hajjah, and Saʿda. In the capital, at least 26 separate rally sites were promoted on affiliated Telegram channels and featured across Al-Thawra's August 5 front page.
Houthis claim this support is about Gaza’s children. But in the public squares of Sana’a, children carry posters of Mohammed Deif, the late commander of Hamas’s al-Qassam Brigades; not Palestinian civilians, not Gazan doctors, not teachers under rubble. Deif, who was killed by an Israeli airstrike in May 2024, was celebrated by Iran and Hezbollah as a martyr of the resistance. Now his image is held aloft by Yemeni schoolchildren too young to understand the man’s legacy — or the cost of his war.
A Houthi-sponsored student rally in Sana’a, as children display an image of Hamas commander Mohammed Deif, glorifying him as a martyr. Children carry signs reading “Death to America, Death to Israel” part of an indoctrination campaign masked as Gaza solidarity.
This isn’t about solidarity with Palestinians. It’s about shaping the minds of children against their enemies. In Houthi schools and media, they’re not learning to support Palestinians, they’re learning to despise Israelis and Jews. The message is not “help the oppressed”; it’s “join the war.” The Houthis are building a movement that glorifies death, vengeance, and foreign commanders who killed and died in wars far from Yemen’s own suffering.
If this were truly about Gaza’s children, the Houthis would protect Yemen’s children from indoctrination, not turn them into ideological recruits. But the regime has made its choice: Gaza’s pain is useful. Palestinian solidarity is just the packaging. The payload is sectarian mobilization and Tehran’s regional vision.
Yemen’s Real Priorities
But while these ordered crowds swell, another Yemen vanishes from view. In the south, areas controlled by Yemen’s government in Aden, Mukalla, Seiyun; people are protesting real issues that are rarely permitted in Houthi media or space: power cuts, fuel shortages, and unpaid salaries. The slogans up north call for martyrdom. The chants down south demand electricity. This split reveals the limits of the Gaza narrative. It's not that Yemenis don't care about Palestine; they do. But the Houthi militia has hijacked that genuine concern, turned it into coercive performance, and silenced voices that don't fit the script.
The strategy is also working internationally. Global media outlets often rebroadcast the Houthis' aerial footage without mentioning that participation is forced. UN statements acknowledge Red Sea operations but rarely address the growing coercion inside Houthi institutions. NGOs working on education or civil society should be asking: are we funding institutions that double as recruitment centers?
It's not just physical infrastructure being hollowed out; it's the foundations of civil society itself. When mass spectacle replaces journalism, when lectures get interrupted for weapons training, when dissent becomes treason, you're no longer dealing with a functioning society. You've got a staging ground.
🎥 WATCH with caution: Houthi-run rally shared on official Houthi channels, is not a spontaneous protest; it’s a compulsory declaration of loyalty. Note how the language glorifies violence, pledges military action, and condemns neutrality as betrayal. Yemen’s educational spaces are being turned into ideological battlegrounds.
What the Houthis are building is a permanent shadow state where every march tests loyalty, every school could become a barracks, and every televised rally distracts from collapsing public services and civic life. Even if Gaza sees a ceasefire tomorrow, this infrastructure will remain. The attendance lists. The combat drills. The loyalty rituals. The control mechanisms.
So when you see the next drone shot with people filling a square, a flag cutting through the crowd, remember you're not looking at solidarity. You're watching a performance of submission. And the real audience isn't Gaza. It's the violent Houthi militia itself, hovering above with its cameras, keeping track of who showed up and who didn't.