Photo UN/E. Debebe Tom Fletcher (on screen), Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and UN Emergency Relief Coordinator, reports to the Security Council on the situation in Yemen. Security Council meeting: renewed fighting threatens to derail peace process in Yemen Peace and Security
The UN Security Council held an open debate Thursday on Yemen, where escalating deadly clashes and Houthi missile attacks on commercial shipping could threaten the 2022 truce and drag the country into a broader regional standoff.
“Yemen today faces the highest risk of returning to major conflict – greater than at any time since the UN-brokered truce in 2022,” Hans Grundberg, the Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for Yemen, said at the meeting. is intensifying, he noted. Regional trade and energy supplies are already under enormous pressure due to the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz.
“Attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden […] threaten to drag Yemen into a broader regional standoff,” Grundberg said.
Rising tensions threaten the fragile truce that was reached with UN support in April 2022. It led to a sharp decrease in the level of violence and an improvement in the humanitarian situation in the country.
“I am convinced that an agreed diplomatic way out [of the current situation] is still possible,” Grundberg emphasized. He spoke about his work with parties to the Yemen conflict to stop political and economic escalation and move toward a ceasefire.
Ongoing engagement with the UN to consolidate progress and restart an inclusive Yemeni-led political process is critical, he stressed. Special Envoy.
“Four years of relative calm can come to nothing in a few weeks of escalation,” he said. – I appeal to all members of the Security Council who have influence on the parties to use it to take Yemen away from the battlefield and return it to the negotiating table.”
Humanitarian situation
“I would like to report positive developments, but the trajectory of the humanitarian crisis remains unchanged,” Tom Fletcher, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and UN Emergency Relief Coordinator, said at the meeting. “More than 10 years after the conflict began, millions of Yemenis face difficult choices every day: food or medicine, education or work, survival or flight,” said he.
The situation of Yemeni women and girls is particularly alarming, Fletcher said, with nearly 11 million of them in need of humanitarian support. More than half the country’s population faces severe food shortages, and six million people – the highest number in the world – are on the brink of famine.
“We know that humanitarian aid saves lives,” the Deputy Secretary General emphasized. At the same time, access to the field for humanitarian workers often remains closed, and the plan for collecting funds is only 20 percent fulfilled. From the Central Emergency Response Fund, the first $10 million has been allocated to ensure food security, but this, in his words, is “a stopgap measure, not a solution.”