Cessation of Hostilities in Yemen’s Hudaydah Continues to Hold: UN
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – A UN spokesperson said a truce agreed between warring parties in and around Yemen’s key port of Hudaydah remains in place.
“The cessation of hostilities in Hudaydah continues to hold,” Farhan Haq said on Thursday, while the Saudi-led coalition has continuously violated the ceasefire.
He added that Martin Griffiths, the United Nations envoy for Yemen, will hold a new round of talks with Houthi Ansarullah movement and the Saudi-backed government of fugitive former president Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi in the coming days.
Griffiths will travel to the capital Sana’a on Saturday for talks with Houthi leaders and with the head of a truce monitoring committee, Dutch general Patrick Cammaert, Haq stated.
He added that the UN envoy will then head to Riyadh to meet with Hadi and other officials.
The UN is hoping to bring the sides together later this month, possibly in Kuwait, to follow up on the progress made in talks in Stockholm in December, diplomats said.
Under the agreement reached in Sweden, both the Houthis and the Saudi-backed party agreed to redeploy from Hudaydah, the Red Sea port that is the entry point for food aid to millions of Yemenis on the brink of famine.
Yemen’s defenseless people have been under massive attacks by the coalition led by Saudi Arabia for more than three-and-a-half years but Riyadh has reached none of its objectives in Yemen so far.
Since March 2015, Saudi Arabia and some of its Arab allies have been carrying out deadly airstrikes against the Houthi Ansarullah movement in an attempt to restore power to Hadi, a close ally of Riyadh.
The aggression and the accompanying blockade have unleashed in Yemen what the United Nations has described as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
The Yemeni Ministry of Human Rights announced in a statement on March 25 that the war had left 600,000 civilians dead and injured until then.
