UN says rival factions in Yemen agree to two-month truce

Yemen’s warring sides have accepted a two-month truce, starting with the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, a UN official has said.

The UN envoy, Hans Grundberg, announced the agreement from Amman, Jordan, after meeting separately with both sides in the country’s brutal civil war in recent days.

He said that he hoped the truce would be renewed after two months.

The agreement comes after a significant escalation in recent weeks that saw Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels claim several attacks across the country’s borders, targeting the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.

The truce is to start on Saturday, the first day of Ramadan, and will also allow for shipments of fuel to arrive in the Yemen’s key port city of Hodeida and for passenger flights to resume from the airport in the capital, Sanaa.

UN spokesperson Farhan Haq said the warring sides agreed to halt all offensive military, air, ground and maritime operations inside Yemen and across its borders, starting at 7pm on Saturday.

The agreement came after the Saudi-led coalition, which has been battling the Houthis in Yemen since 2015, began observing a unilateral ceasefire on Wednesday — an offer that was rejected by the rebels.

Saudi Arabia had proposed the unilateral ceasefire as part of talks it hosted aiming to resolve the war in Yemen. But the Houthis did not attend the talks because they were held on neutral territory.

Last Saturday, the Houthis also announced their own unilateral initiative that included a three-day suspension of cross-border attacks on Saudi Arabia, as well as fighting inside Yemen.

Their announcement came shortly after they claimed attacks on a key Saudi oil facility in the Red Sea city of Jiddah, ahead of a Formula One race in the kingdom.

On Friday, in a Twitter post, Mohammed Abdel-Salam, the spokesman and chief negotiator of the Houthis, welcomed the ceasefire.

Yemen’s war began in September 2014, when the Houthis swept into the capital, Sanaa, from their north-western stronghold in the Arab world’s poorest country.

The Houthis then pushed into exile the government of President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, elected in 2012 as the sole candidate after the long rule of Ali Abdullah Saleh.

A Saudi-led coalition, including the UAE, entered the war in March 2015 to try and restore Mr Hadi’s government to power. But the war, which evolved into a proxy conflict, stretched into long bloody years, pushing much of Yemen’s people to the brink of famine.

The United Nations and others had been pushing the coalition and rebels to stop the fighting for Ramadan, as has tenuously occurred in past years.

“This is the result of fairly painstaking work” by Mr Grundberg and other diplomats, Mr Haq said. He said the envoy called the truce “a first and long-overdue step” toward ending the fighting that has killed more than 150,000 people, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project figures. That figure includes both fighters and civilians.

During the two-month truce, the Saudi-led coalition will allow 18 vessels carrying fuel into the port of Hodeida, and two commercial flights a week from and to the Yemeni capital to Jordan and Egypt.

After the truce takes effect, the UN envoy will call for both sides to convene to agree on opening roads around Taiz and other provinces, the document said.

Taiz, which remains partially held by the forces fighting on behalf of the internationally recognized government, has been blockaded by the Houthis for years.

There are hopes the truce could build momentum for further steps towards peace, though past attempts at ceasefires have repeatedly fallen through. The terms of this latest agreement bear a resemblance to a 2018 peace deal that brought an end to fighting in Hodeida but failed to bring wider peace.

The Iran-backed Houthis and Yemen’s internationally recognised government have also said they were working on a deal to release over 2,220 prisoners of war, including Mr Hadi’s brother and a former defence minister.