UN says assault on Yemeni port could cost 250,000 civilian lives
Along-anticipated assault on Yemen’s port city of Hodeidah by the Saudi-led coalition could cost up to 250,000 lives, a senior United Nations humanitarian official said on Friday.
A coalition spokesman said on Tuesday that allied forces were 20 km (12 miles) from Houthi-held Hodeidah, but he did not specify whether there were plans for an assault to seize the port, the chief entry point for food and supplies needed to ease a famine and cholera epidemic, Reuters reported.
Humanitarian agencies working in Yemen are deeply worried about the likely impact of an assault. As many as 600,000 civilians currently live in and around Hodeidah, which lies on Yemen’s Red Sea coast, the United Nations said.
“A military attack or siege on Hodeidah will impact hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians,” the UN humanitarian coordinator in the country, Lise Grande, said in a statement.
“In a prolonged worst case, we fear that as many as 250,000 people may lose everything — even their lives.”
Coalition officials could not immediately be reached for further comment.
Senior aid officials have urged the United States and other Western powers providing arms and intelligence to the coalition to push the Persian Gulf Arab allies to reconvene UN talks with the Houthi movement to avoid a bloodbath and end the three-year-old war.
Yemen has been racked by violence since 2014. The conflict escalated in 2015 when Saudi Arabia and its allies launched a devastating air campaign aimed at undermining the Houthi Ansarullah movement and reinstating former president, Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, a staunch ally of Riyadh.
The United Nations says Yemen is the world’s worst humanitarian crisis; 22.2 million Yemenis are in need of humanitarian aid, and 8.4 million are at risk of starvation, a number that will rise to 18 million this year if conditions do not improve.
Former Yemeni political sources have said the UN Yemen mediator, Martin Griffiths, is in talks with the Houthis to hand over control of the port to the United Nations in an attempt to avert a possible assault.
The broader UN peace plan calls on the Houthi movement to give up its ballistic missiles in return for an end to the bombing campaign against it by the Saudi-led coalition and a transitional governance agreement, according to a draft document and sources.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said on Thursday it had pulled 71 international staff out of Yemen because of security incidents and threats, moving them to Djibouti.