Local Editor
Yemen's Saudi-backed regime said on Saturday it agreed to a two-point plan advanced by the United Nations to ease suffering in the country's civil war, but Houthi Ansarullah movement remained skeptical.
On Thursday the U.N. Security Council urged the warring parties to agree on a U.N.-brokered plan to keep the port of Hodeida out of the fighting and to resume government salary payments.
The U.N. has proposed that Hodeida, a vital aid delivery point on the Red Sea where some 80 percent of Yemen's food imports arrive, should be turned over to a neutral party. The U.N. Security Council warned the Saudi-led Arab coalition, that is fighting the Houthis, against any attempt to extend the war to the port.
Foreign Minister of the Hadi regime Abdel-Malek al-Mekhlafi said in a tweet his government renewed its acceptance of the proposals first made by U.N. Yemen envoy Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed in May.
But a spokesperson for the Houthis said the Security Council through its statements was encouraging the Saudi-led alliance to resume its strikes and that they reserved the right to respond to any aggression.
"We reaffirm that the army and local committees have all the right and legality to respond to the alliance," a statement by spokesperson Mohammed Abdulsalam said.
Yemen has been torn apart by more than two years of war that pits the Houthi group against the regime of President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi, which is backed by the Saudi-led alliance. More than 10,000 people have died in the conflict and hunger is widespread.
Many thousands of Yemeni state workers are also facing destitution as their salaries have gone largely unpaid for several months after the Hadi regime shifted Yemen's central bank to Aden from the capital Sana’a.
U.N. Yemen envoy Ould Cheikh Ahmed had told the Security Council on May 30 that he had proposed a deal to avoid military clashes in Hodeida to be negotiated in parallel with an agreement to resume civil service salary payments nationally.
However, he noted the Houthis and the allied General People's Congress, the party of former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, would not meet with him.
Source: News Agencies, Edited by Website Team
