“Mutual accusations of violating the UN truce”headlines the pan-Arab site Arab21. “Just hours after a UN-brokered ceasefire came into effect, the Yemeni army on one side and the Houthi rebels on the other accused each other of various violations.” Most “he generally held up throughout this first day”tempers the British newspaper The Guardian.
This renewable two-month truce was announced on April 2, on the occasion of the beginning of the month of Ramadan, the Muslim fast, by the UN special envoy for Yemen, the Swedish diplomat Hans Grundberg. It provides, in addition to the cessation of fighting, the arrival of commercial ships, two flights a week between the airport of Sanaa, the capital of the country held by the Houthis since 2014, and respectively Cairo in Egypt and Amman in Jordan, the opening of roads to civilians, in particular towards Taiz (south-west), as well as contacts between the special envoy and the belligerents with a view to carrying out “new steps to end the war.”
“The burial of illusions of victory”
“Why is he intervening now?”, wonders for its part the site Al-Monitor. According to Mohammed Al-Basha, an expert on Yemen at the Navanti research group in the United States,