Houthi rebels breached a ceasefire hours after the Yemeni government said the army would suspend military operations, state-run Yemen News Agency SABA reported, citing government officials.
Houthi rebels attacked houses and military camps with rockets in five districts, SABA reported, citing a spokesman for the Office of the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces. The report didn’t say whether the ceasefire, which started at noon on Saturday, had been abandoned by the government.
Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh had urged Shiite rebels on Friday not to miss the chance for peace offered by his government’s decision to suspend a five-week-old offensive as fighting raged on regardless.
“We renew this appeal to them to listen to the voice of reason, adopt a policy of peace and seize this new opportunity,” Saleh said.
Earlier the government said a suspension of fighting in the mountainous north would become a permanent ceasefire if the rebels abided by certain conditions. A rebel spokesman said they would “examine” them.
Posted on defense ministry Web site www.26sep.net, the government statement said the move was a response to appeals to allow humanitarian aid into the Saada region, where thousands of civilians have been displaced by the fighting.
The government said a permanent ceasefire would come into effect if the rebels accepted a series of conditions, including “respect the ceasefire and the opening of roads, evacuate their positions and free captured civilians and soldiers.”
The rebels, however, accused the army of “continuing their aggression in the combat zone despite announcing a suspension of hostilities.”
It said army attacks were “accompanied by intense rocket and shellfire,” comparing the fighting to “a state of war.”
A senior military official in Sanaa said in a statement that the rebels “are continuing to battle the military at Malaheez, Sufyan and Bakem.”
Earlier a rebel spokesman told al-Jazeera TV of the government’s conditions for a ceasefire that “we are ready to examine them, and that is natural.”
Mohammed Abdelsalam said the group had already made known its “commitment to a return to the situation as it was — opening roads, pulling out of our positions and the return of the local authorities.”
“We do not wish to keep holding our detainees despite the fact that those in power are holding on to their prisoners, in some cases for more than four years,” he said.
The army launched operation Scorched Earth on Aug. 11, and relief groups warned of worsening humanitarian conditions among the tens of thousands of civilians forced from their homes by the fighting.
The UN estimates that some 150,000 people have been displaced since 2004 by persistent instability in the north.
The government accuses the rebels of seeking to restore the Zaidi Shiite imamate, which was overthrown in a 1962 coup that sparked eight years of civil war.
An offshoot of Shiite Islam, the Zaidis are a minority in mainly Sunni Yemen but the majority community in the north. They are also known as Huthis after their late leader, Hussein Badr Eddin al-Huthi, who was killed in 2004.
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