Aid Agencies Call on Yemen’s Warring Parties to Renew Truce

DUBAI (KI) – Aid agencies urged Yemen’s warring parties to extend a two-month UN-brokered truce on Tuesday two days before it was set to expire, saying it had “positive humanitarian impacts”.
A brutal seven-year conflict by Saudi-backed mercenaries and militants against the Sana’a-based government has killed hundreds of thousands of people and left millions on the brink of famine.
On April 2, the first nationwide truce since 2016 came into force, but that runs out on Thursday.
“As organizations working across Yemen, we have seen the positive humanitarian impacts of the truce,” said a joint statement by over 30 aid agencies, including Save The Children, Oxfam and the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC).
Earlier this month, NRC said the number of civilian casualties in Yemen had dropped by more than half since the truce took effect.
“We... urge you to extend the truce agreement, build further on the gains you have made possible over the past two months, and work towards peace for the people of Yemen,” they added.
Yemen has been under brutal war spearheaded by Saudi Arabia since March 2015. The Saudi-led coalition launched the war to eliminate the Ansarullah resistance movement and reinstall the former Riyadh-friendly regime of Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi in Sana’a.
The conflict, accompanied by a tight siege, has failed to reach its goals while killing hundreds of thousands of Yemeni people.
The UN says more than 24 million Yemenis are in dire need of humanitarian aid, including 10 million suffering from extreme levels of hunger. The world body also refers to the situation in Yemen as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. The war has also taken a heavy toll on Yemen’s infrastructure, destroying hospitals, schools, and factories.
A report says, as the Saudi-led war and siege on Yemen rages in spite of widespread global outrage, Yemenis have been employing an innovative way to circumvent the blockade, namely launching rockets carrying food to the besieged city of al-Durayhimi.
The Yemeni city of al-Durayhimi, located in the volatile province of Hudaydah, is one of the cities particularly targeted by the siege of the Saudi-led military campaign.
However, according to a report by Yemeni news agency Al Elam Al Harbi, the Yemeni military had to improvise and launch rockets containing food to the region on a daily basis.
The report said eight to ten such rockets were launched by the Yemeni military each day, collectively amounting to 2500 rockets so far.