Houthi Leader Urges UN Chief to Help End Saudi War on Yemen

In remarks released late on Friday, Houthi called on the UN chief to issue “a binding resolution” to end the devastating war on Yemen. 

The United Nations has never formed an independent investigative committee to examine the developments in Yemen, he deplored.

Earlier in the day, Guterres had called for a halt to violence in Yemen to pull the country back from a "precipice" and build momentum toward talks on ending the war.

The UN chief spoke hours after the Saudi-led coalition said it had attacked an airbase in the capital, Sana’a, and fighting flared between the Houthis and the Saudi-led forces near the western port city of al-Hudaydah.

"First, violence must stop everywhere - with an immediate halt around critical infrastructure and densely populated areas," Guterres told reporters at the UN headquarters in New York.

"Yemen today stands on a precipice," he said as UN aid agencies fear millions more could be pushed to the brink of famine in the conflict.

Yemen’s defenseless people have been under massive attacks by the coalition for more than three-and-a-half 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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