‘SANA’A (Dispatches) – UN aid flights into Yemen’s capital Sana’a have been halted by air strikes carried out by the Saudi-led coalition which supports the former regime, an airport official said Tuesday.
Because of Saudi-led air strikes, “the airport is no longer able to receive aircraft operated by the United Nations or international humanitarian organizations”, the official told AFP.
Flights into Sana’a airport have been largely halted by a Saudi-led blockade since August 2016.
The airport official, who asked not to be identified, called on the United Nations to secure a halt to the raids so that the airport could resume operations.
On Monday evening, the Saudi-led coalition said it had carried out strikes on targets in Sana’a international airport.
The leader of Yemen’s popular Ansarullah resistance movement has also lambasted Saudi Arabia for allowing Zionist flights to cross over its airspace while traveling to or from the United Arab Emirates, arguing that the controversial measure comes as the Riyadh regime has maintained a tight all-out blockade on war-torn Yemen.
“While Saudi Arabia maintains a blockade on Yemen’s airspace, the Riyadh regime opened the skies of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina for the Zionist prime minister (Naftali Bennett) to fly to the UAE,” Abdul-Malik al-Houthi said at a meeting with several visiting Yemeni tribal delegations in the capital Sana’a on Sunday evening.
The Zionist prime minister met the UAE’s de facto ruler on December 13. He became the first leader of the occupying regime to visit the Persian Gulf state, more than a year after the two sides agreed to establish formal relations.
Saudi Arabia, backed by the United States and regional allies, launched the war on Yemen in March 2015, with the goal of bringing the government of former Yemeni president Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi back to power and crushing the Ansarullah movement.
The war has left hundreds of thousands of Yemenis dead, and displaced millions more. It has also destroyed Yemen’s infrastructure and spread famine and infectious diseases there, deepening the world’s worst humanitarian crisis day by day.