Luke Symons was captured by Houthi rebels and accused of being a spy but was never put on trial
A British man who was held captive in Yemen without charge or trial for five years has been released from jail.
In 2017, Luke Symons, 30, was detained by Houthi rebels at a security checkpoint on suspicion of espionage.
Continue reading...Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi says a newly established council will lead negotiations with Iranian-backed Houthis
Yemen’s exiled president has stepped aside and transferred his powers to a presidential council as international and regional efforts to end the country’s long-running civil war gained momentum with a two-month truce.
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, major players in the conflict, appear to have had a role in Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi’s decision, quickly welcoming it with a pledge of $3bn (£2.3bn) in aid. The head of the new council has close ties to Riyadh.
Continue reading...UN special envoy Hans Grundberg stresses importance of building on truce in effort to end six-year war
A UN-brokered two-month ceasefire in Yemen was broadly holding on its first full day with oil shipments reaching the port of Hodeida, including some ships that have been barred from entering for 88 days.
The ceasefire is the biggest step forward in the six-year war and is intended to apply inside and outside the country’s borders.
Continue reading...Agreement comes after significant escalation in bloody conflict between Saudi-led coalition and Houthi rebels
Yemen’s warring sides have accepted a two-month truce, starting with the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, according to the UN envoy to the country.
Hans Grundberg announced the agreement from Amman, Jordan, after meeting separately with both sides in the country’s brutal civil war. He said he hoped the truce would be renewed after two months.
Continue reading...Exclusive: agencies write letter to government after learning home secretary is pushing for designation
Yemen could be afflicted by an even worse humanitarian catastrophe if the UK government goes ahead with a plan to designate the Houthi rebels as a terrorist group, leading aid agencies have warned cabinet ministers in a letter.
The 11 UK agencies are some of those most active in Yemen, and include Save the Children, Care, the International Rescue Committee and Islamic Relief.
Continue reading...UN chief António Guterres calls for ‘restraint’ on all sides in seven-year conflict
UN chief António Guterres on Saturday condemned an exchange of attacks between Yemen’s Houthi rebels and the Saudi-led coalition, calling for “restraint” on all sides in the seven-year conflict.
“The secretary-general strongly condemns the recent escalation of the conflict in Yemen,” UN spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric said in a statement Saturday.
Continue reading...Yemen’s Houthi rebels claim responsibility for huge blaze days before F1 race is due to take place
A fire has erupted at an oil depot in Jeddah days ahead of a Formula One race in the Saudi city after what Yemen’s Houthi rebels claimed was an attack by the group.
The blaze – not immediately acknowledged by Saudi Arabia or its state-run oil company Saudi Aramco – was centred on the same fuel depot that the Houthis had attacked in recent days.
Continue reading...Agencies forced to cut back aid in Yemen, Afghanistan, South Sudan and Ethiopia despite growing need as funds go to Ukraine
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has put huge pressure on an already shrinking pot of international aid.
Aid agencies working in countries with the most pressing emergencies, including Yemen, Afghanistan, South Sudan and Ethiopia, are facing difficult decisions on how to spend their money.
Continue reading...Efforts to stock up Kyiv, Kharkiv and Dnipro are under way as the wider repercussions of the conflict are felt in Yemen and Lebanon
Aid workers are racing to deliver emergency food supplies to Ukrainian cities at risk of “medieval tactics of besiegement”, a spokesperson for the World Food Programme (WFP) has said.
In a dramatic turnaround for a country long hailed as the “breadbasket of the world”, the UN’s emergency food agency is now trying to get stocks into warehouses in Ukrainian cities such as Kyiv, Kharkiv and Dnipro before it is too late, said Jakob Kern.
Continue reading...Aid agencies warn of ‘ripple effect’ as soaring wheat prices hit countries already facing inflation, food insecurity and conflict
Concerns are growing across the Middle East and north Africa that the war in Ukraine will send prices of staple foods soaring as wheat supplies are hit, potentially fuelling unrest. Russia and Ukraine supply a quarter of the world’s wheat exports, while Egypt is the world’s biggest importer of wheat.
In Tunisia, like many people queueing for bread in Tunis’s sprawling medina, or old town, Khmaes Ammani, a day labourer, said the rising cost of living was leaving him squeezed. “There’s never any money at the end of the month,” he said. “I even have to borrow some. Everything is getting more expensive.”
Continue reading...Analysis: a new pact will be worse for Israel than the old one and Iran’s influence in the region has grown in recent years
The US decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal was an immense personal achievement for former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In a leaked video, he boasted that he had personally convinced Donald Trump to scrap the 2015 accord between Tehran and world powers.
“I had to stand up against the whole world and come out against this agreement,” Netanyahu told members of his Likud party in the clip from 2018. “And we didn’t give up.”
Continue reading...Hundreds also wounded as Saudi-led coalition denies reports it bombed detention centre in Sa’ada
The UN has condemned an airstrike on a detention centre in northern Yemen as the death toll rose to more than 80.
The airstrike in the rebel-held Sa’ada province on Friday morning followed a Houthi drone attack on the United Arab Emirates on Monday that killed three people. It marks an intensification of violence in the seven-year civil war between the government, supported by a Saudi-led coalition, and the Iranian-backed rebels.
Continue reading...An airstrike on a prison in northern Yemen has killed at least 60 people and wounded 200 more. The violence marked an especially deadly day in the seven-year war, leaving bystanders searching through rubble with their bare hands to rescue those trapped in the detention centre in Sa’ada. Overwhelmed nearby hospitals said they had been forced to turn away some of the injured. The attack comes five days after the Houthis claimed a drone-and-missile attack on Abu Dhabi that killed three people
Continue reading...Hospitals overwhelmed in Sa’ada after attack levels buildings in Houthi northern heartland
An airstrike on a prison in northern Yemen killed at least 60 people and wounded 200 more, while a separate attack shut down the country’s internet, as Saudi-led reprisals to a Houthi drone attack on the United Arab Emirates intensified.
The violence marked an especially deadly day in the seven-year war, leaving bystanders searching through rubble with their bare hands to rescue those trapped in two locations: a prison in the city of Sa’ada and a telecommunications centre in the port city of Hodeidah, where three children playing football nearby were reported to have been killed.
Continue reading...For seven years, the Yemeni people have been pummelled with Saudi bombs, many from Britain. Yet Westminster is silent
This is a far greater scandal than the parties in Downing Street. In a just world, it would prove the downfall of our prime minister. This week, airstrikes by the Saudis and their allies killed more than a dozen people in Yemen, civilians among them. Last month an estimated 32 civilians died as a result of the ongoing conflict. The country has been convulsed by civil war since 2014. For seven years, a Saudi-led coalition has been pummelling the impoverished country with bombs, many of them supplied by Britain. Through our staunch military alliance with the Saudi dictatorship, our government is directly complicit with these atrocities.
You can be forgiven for knowing nothing about any of this: Yemen does not matter, you see. Its people have been relegated to the bottom of the hierarchy of death, and most of our media show little interest in scrutinising our government for slaughter that it is directly complicit in. The Saudi violence has only increased in Yemen since October, after the UN human rights council voted to end its war crimes investigation following intensive lobbying by the dictatorship in Riyadh.
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
Continue reading...Yemen’s Houthi forces claim strikes, which follow pressure on Iran to kickstart nuclear talks with US
Houthi forces in Yemen have claimed responsibility for an apparent drone attack in Abu Dhabi that killed three people and is likely to raise regional tensions as a crucial phase nears in nuclear discussions with Iran.
The strikes, which also injured six people, left flames billowing from an oil storage site near the airport of the United Arab Emirates’ capital. A separate explosion, which is also thought to have been caused by a drone, caused minor damage. Two Indian nationals and one Pakistani were killed amid the fireballs. All the wounded were reported to be lightly hurt.
Continue reading...Coalition says vessel was carrying medical supplies but Huthis claim they have seized ‘military cargo ship’
Yemeni rebels have seized an Emirati-flagged vessel in the Red Sea, with the insurgents and the Saudi-led coalition giving contrasting explanations for the latest escalation in a seven-year war.
The coalition, fighting in support of Yemen’s internationally recognised government, said on Monday that the vessel was carrying medical supplies but the rebels said they had seized “a military cargo ship with military equipment”.
Continue reading...Years of brutal conflict have brought misery to an already impoverished country. There is no end in sight
By the end of this year, the United Nations warned recently, 377,000 Yemenis will have died from seven devastating years of war – in many cases killed by indirect causes such as hunger; in others, by airstrikes or missile bombardments. Seventy per cent of the fatalities are thought to be children under five.
As 2021 began, there were hopes that Joe Biden’s arrival in the White House might bring progress towards peace. His administration quickly announced it was ending all support for offensive operations by Saudi Arabia, which spearheaded the US- and UK-backed coalition fighting for the internationally recognised government overthrown by Houthi rebels. It also revoked the Trump administration’s designation of the Houthis as a terrorist group. But Mr Biden’s team overestimated its ability to help resolve the crisis. The diplomatic push soon faltered. In October, Washington announced a $500m military contract with Riyadh which includes support for its attack helicopters, used in operations in Yemen.
Continue reading...Years of fighting mean children as old as 10 have never been to school. Khaled Ziad’s images document a generation whose entire future is at risk
Their classroom has no roof, no seats, no desks; most of the 50 small children sitting on the rubble-strewn floor have no pens or paper. But the students in this makeshift school in Hays, a village in Yemen’s Hodeidah province, are still among the luckiest in the country simply for having a teacher and a place to learn.
Seven years into a catastrophic war that sparked the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, Yemen’s conflict shows no signs of ending soon, and the future of an entire generation is at risk of being destroyed. About 3 million children are unable to attend school, according to the Red Cross, with 8.1 million needing urgent educational assistance.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Analysis of Kamel Jendoubi’s mobile phone reveals he was targeted in August 2019
The mobile phone of a UN-backed investigator who was examining possible war crimes in Yemen was targeted with spyware made by Israel’s NSO Group, a new forensic analysis of the device has revealed.
Kamel Jendoubi, a Tunisian who served as the chairman of the now defunct Group of Eminent Experts in Yemen (GEE)– a panel mandated by the UN to investigate possible war crimes – was targeted in August 2019, according to an analysis of his mobile phone by experts at Amnesty International and the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto.
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