Yemen's main warring factions
endorsed a U.N.-brokered humanitarian truce from midnight on
Friday although heavy fighting on the ground and Saudi air
strikes carried on relentlessly.
The week-long truce will end at the same time as the Muslim
holy month of Ramadan and aims to get aid to some 21 million
Yemenis. All sides said they hoped a full ceasefire would
follow.
A Saudi Arabia-led coalition of Arab states has been bombing
the Iranian-allied Houthi rebel movement since late March in a
bid to restore to power Yemen's President Abd-Rabbu Mansour
Hadi, who has fled to Riyadh.
The dominant Houthis shelled residential areas in the
southern port of Aden overnight and pushed further into Yemen's
eastern Hadramawt desert, the center of the country's modest oil
resources, fighting tribal militiamen, a local official said.
The Saudi-led campaign of air strikes targeted the capital
Sanaa on Friday and hit mainly central and southern cities
overnight.
The Arab coalition has pounded the Houthis and their army
allies from the air since March 26 as part of a bid to restore
exiled president Hadi to power. The air raids and fighting have
killed more than 3,000 people since then.
"We hope this truce will be the beginning of the end of the
Saudi aggression and the end of the violation of United Nations
conventions that the war of aggression on Yemen has seen," a top
Houthi leader, Mohammed al-Houthi said in a statement.
The party of Yemen's ex-president Ali Abdullah Saleh, whose
loyalists in the military have been a major ally in the Houthi's
advance in Yemen's south, also welcomed the pause in fighting.
U.N. envoy Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed clinched the deal after
intensive discussions with Houthi leaders on Thursday.
He told Reuters that the more thorny political discussions
would wait until after the humanitarian work was done.
Yemen's government has demanded that the Houthis conform to
a U.N. Security Council Resolution in April which called on them
to quit seized land and release prisoners.
"We must distinguish between the so-called humanitarian
truce which has been insisted upon by the United Nations for a
while and what we insist upon and hope for: that there will be a
full truce with a comprehensive ceasefire including the
withdrawal of forces," Yemeni Foreign Minister Riyadh Yasseen
told state-owned Saudi Ekhbariya TV on Thursday.
The Houthis do not agreeing to those demands and view their
takeover of the capital in September and spread across the
country as part of a revolution against a corrupt government
backed by the West.
REUTERS