Nearly 100 people were killed on Monday in airstrikes across Yemen, the nation’s state news agency reported, as a Saudi-led coalition stepped up attacks that are likely to weigh on efforts to broker a humanitarian truce.
The UN has been pushing for a halt to the air strikes and fighting that have killed nearly 3,000 people in Yemen since March when the Saudi-led coalition intervened against the Iranian-backed Houthi forces to try to restore exiled Yemeni President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi.
Yemen’s Saba news agency said 54 people had been killed in a series of raids in Amran Province, north of the capital, Sana’a, including 40 who had been shopping at a market in Eyal Yazeed District.
Photo: AFP
It said a number of women and children were among the dead.
Saba said Saudi-led war planes also killed more than 40 people in a raid on a livestock market in the town of al-Foyoush in southern Yemen.
Local residents also reported 30 deaths in a raid they said apparently targeted a Houthi checkpoint on a main road between Aden and Lahj. They said 10 of the dead were Houthi fighters.
A spokesman for the Saudi-led coalition could not immediately be reached for comment, but a spokesman previously said the coalition does not target civilians.
UN special envoy to Yemen Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed held talks with officials from the dominant Houthi group to try to broker a ceasefire to allow aid supplies to be delivered.
The Yemeni government, exiled in Riyadh, said consultations were being held on implementing an April UN resolution calling for the Houthis to quit cities seized since September last year and for aid supplies to be sent to stricken Yemeni civilians.
“We are now in consultations for guarantees to ensure the success of the truce. The mechanism we presented to implement [the UN resolution] demanded real guarantees to ensure aid is delivered to those who need it,” Hadi spokesman Rajeh Badi said, adding that talks were underway to “lift the deliberate siege on Aden, Taiz, Lahj and Dhalea.”
Major cities in central and southern Yemen have been racked by heavy fighting between the Houthis and a patchwork of military, regional and tribal forces allied with Hadi.
Badi said a sought-after “humanitarian pause” would last until the end of the three-day Eid al-Fitr holiday that marks the end of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, expected to start on July 17.
The Houthis have also signaled readiness to honor a truce.
The intensive diplomacy came amid a growing outcry over the deteriorating humanitarian situation after more than three months of air strikes on the impoverished nation prompted by the Houthi advance south on an area controlled by Hadi’s government.
Saudi Arabia sees the Houthis as proxies for arch-rival Iran, which they accuse of trying to expand its influence in Riyadh’s immediate backyard.
The UN last week designated the war in Yemen as a Level 3 humanitarian crisis, its most severe category, and the US and the EU have endorsed calls for a humanitarian suspension of hostilities.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema