In a visit to northern Yemen on Saturday, UN Special Envoy Martin Griffiths repeated his call for an immediate freeze on military activities and for warring parties to work towards a de-escalation in fighting.
The UN human rights office is calling on authorities in Yemen to revoke death sentences imposed against 35 parliamentarians allegedly for treason charges.
Intense clashes in Yemen’s Al Hazam City, this month have caused massive displacement with an estimated 1,800 families forced to flee their homes, according to a flash update from UN humanitarian coordination office, OCHA.
Attacks on health facilities in Yemen’s Marib province, East of the capital Sana’a, have left some 15,000 people – many of them displaced from other parts of the country – with severely limited options for medical care, the UN said on Monday.
When warring parties in Yemen met in a renovated castle outside the Swedish capital last December for UN-brokered talks, they showed that perhaps there could be a way out of brutal conflict and the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, the UN Special Envoy for the country said this week.
The momentum to reach a political settlement in Yemen “has been building”, the United Nations Special Envoy to the country told the Security Council on Friday, attributing the positive development to compromises on “a range of issues”.
Hopes for a possible end to the war in Yemen grew slightly on Monday, following the news that nearly 300 detainees have been released as a gesture of goodwill by Houthi forces, pitted against the Government of Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi.
The people of Yemen have been subject to “numerous” possible war crimes in recent years including forced recruitment of children and sexual abuse in detention, UN-appointed senior rights experts said on Tuesday, in an appeal to the international community to do more to end the conflict.
Lise Grande, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Yemen, described Sunday’s deadly airstrikes in Dhamar City as a “horrific incident”, and the scale of the casualties, as “staggering”. “These are very dark times for Yemen,” said Ms. Grande. "There have been days of fighting and strikes in the south and hundreds of casualties”.
The United Nations announced on Wednesday that it is being forced to close down several humanitarian programmes in Yemen because money pledged by Member States to pay for them has “failed to materialize”.
