Houthi Leader Urges UN Chief to Facilitate Humanitarian Aid in Yemen

In similar letters to Guterres, the UN’s under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator, and the UN special envoy to Yemen, Houthi has suggested a mechanism for replacing food assistance with financial assistance so that poor families in Yemen would be able to meet their needs directly, the Arabic-language al-Masirah TV reported.

Houthi emphasized that the proposal would guarantee the delivery of assistance to needy families and help overcome obstacles created by the Saudi-led siege on Yemen.

In a recent interview with FRANCE 24, the UN special envoy for Yemen, Martin Griffiths, warned that "critical actions need to be taken now" to avoid a full-blown famine.

Griffiths also expressed hope that the conflict could soon come to an end despite the failure of UN-brokered peace talks in Geneva earlier this month.

Yemen’s defenseless people have been under massive attacks by the Saudi-led coalition for more than three years but Riyadh has reached none of its objectives in Yemen so far.

Since March 2015, Saudi Arabia and some of its Arab allies have been carrying out deadly airstrikes against the Houthi Ansarullah movement in an attempt to restore power to fugitive former president Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi, a close ally of Riyadh.

The Yemeni Ministry of Human Rights announced in a statement on March 25 that the war had left 600,000 civilians dead and injured until then. The war and the accompanying blockade have also caused famine across Yemen.

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