UNITED NATIONS — The U.N. envoy for Yemen warned Tuesday that recent developments in the Red Sea, Israel and inside the country “show the real danger of a devastating region-wide escalation” — but he also pointed to a glimmer of hope.
Hans Grundberg said Yemen’s warring parties — the internationally recognized government and Houthi rebels – informed him Monday night “that they have agreed on a path to de-escalate a cycle of measures and countermeasures which had sought to tighten their grip on the banking and transport sectors.”
Grundberg told the U.N. Security Council that seven months of escalation reached “a new and dangerous level last week” which saw a Houthi drone attack on Tel Aviv and Israeli retaliatory attacks on Yemen’s key port of Hodeida and its oil and power facilities.
He said Houthi attacks on ships in the Red Sea and surrounding waterways continue, and that the rebels are escalating their crackdown “on civic space and on international organizations,” and escalating economic issues have been “translating into public threats to return to full-fledged war.”
Yemen has been engulfed in civil war since 2014, when the Iranian-backed Houthis seized much of northern Yemen and forced the internationally recognized government to flee from the capital, Sanaa. A Saudi-led coalition intervened the following year in support of government forces, and in time the conflict turned into a proxy war…
