UN:

Yemeni Ex-Gov’t, Houthis Invited to Talks

Date: 17 August 2018 - 22:08

News ID: ۵۶۴۱۳

SANAA (Dispatches) – The United Nations has invited Yemen's former government and the Houthi Ansarullah movement to hold talks in Geneva next month on ways to resolve the country's crisis, a UN spokeswoman says.
"I can confirm that the Office of the Special Envoy sent out invitations," UN spokeswoman Alessandra Vellucci told reporters on Friday.
The UN special envoy to Yemen, Martin Griffiths, said earlier this month that the consultations are due to begin in Geneva on September 6 on a framework for peace talks and confidence-building measures.
The UN, he said, is primarily trying to reach an agreement between the Saudi-backed side and Yemen's ruling Houthis "on the issues essential to ending the war and on a national unity government in which everyone participates."
Meanwhile, thousands of civilians are trapped in Yemen’s Hudaydah as Saudi Arabia and allies step up their attacks to capture the port city from the Houthi Ansarullah movement.
Backed by air power from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, militia groups loyal to Yemen’s ousted former president, Abd Rbbuh Mansour Hadi, have been pushing to seize the Duraihami district, which lies adjacent to southern Hudaydah.
The Saudi-led front mounted a new offensive in Duraihami on Tuesday, two days after laying a siege to the heavily-populated area.
Local reports said the area is being constantly targeted by Saudi-led airstrikes, rocket attacks, artillery and an ongoing ground offensive.
The Houthi fighters say the Saudi-led coalition has been indiscriminately targeting civilians.
Human Rights Watch says the Saudi-led coalition has conducted scores of "indiscriminate and disproportionate air strikes” hitting civilian objects that have killed thousands of civilians "in violation of the laws of war”, with munitions that the US, United Kingdom, and others still supply.
In one of their most abhorrent attacks, Saudi warplanes targeted a school bus in Yemen’s northwestern province of Sa’ada last week, leaving 40 children and 11 adults dead.
According to data from an independent monitoring group, the Yemen Data Project, this was just one of 55 instances of attacks on Yemeni civilian vehicles this year.
The group also suggests that Saudis are targeting civilians on purpose as an extensive analysis of over 18,000 airstrikes from March 2015 to April 2016 shows that almost a third (31%) of the targets were non-military – civilians or civilian infrastructure.
This is while only 36 percent of the attacks targeted military sites. The rest of the attacks were classified as having an unknown target.