The UN envoy for Yemen said yesterday he will immediately return to the region to try to clinch a peace deal in the coming weeks, even though both sides have rejected his proposals.
“The ball is in the court of the Yemeni parties,” Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed told the Security Council which met to discuss the 19-month war in Yemen.
The council is seeking to turn up the pressure on both the Iran-backed Houthi rebels and the Saudi-backed government to end the war that has killed thousands and brought the country to its knees.
“What are the parties waiting for to sign a political agreement? Have they not understood that there are no winners in wars?” asked the envoy.
Ould Cheikh Ahmed has presented a roadmap to the Houthi rebels and their allies and the Yemeni government to revive political talks, but he acknowledged to the council that his proposals had been rejected.
The plan calls for the appointment of a new vice president and the formation of a national unity government that will oversee a transition leading to elections.
Under the roadmap, the Houthis would withdraw from Sanaa, Hodeidah and Taiz and hand over their weapons in a process carried out in parallel with the new political arrangements.
Yemen’s President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi has rejected the UN peace proposal, saying it “rewards the putschists” who seized power in Sanaa, while the rebels said the roadmap had “fundamental flaws.”
Ould Cheikh Ahmed said he would return to the region immediately after his report to the council and that his roadmap “should allow a comprehensive settlement in the coming weeks if the parties engage in good faith.”
The Mauritanian diplomat has led negotiations in Yemen since April 2015 and brokered a series of ceasefires that were often violated and failed to generate momentum towards a peace deal.
Almost 6,900 people have been killed in the war - more than half of them civilians - while another 3mn are displaced and millions more need food aid.
UN aid chief Stephen O’Brien told the council that the humanitarian crisis was worsening, with 80% of the population in need of food.
“Yemen is one step away from famine,” he said.
Over 2mn people are malnourished including 370,000 children who face severe malnutrition.
Cholera is spreading, with 61 confirmed cases and more than 1,700 suspected cases, said O’Brien, the UN under-secretary general for humanitarian affairs.
He urged Saudi Arabia to allow commercial flights to resume to Sanaa to allow students to pursue their studies abroad and Yemeni patients to obtain treatment.
“It is within their power, their choice to permit this,” he said of Riyadh.
O’Brien appealed to donors to help rebuild the port of Hodeidah, which was damaged by air strikes, describing it as “the lifeline of the country” which is almost entirely reliant on imports.

Iran denies accusation of arms shipments
Iran’s foreign ministry has rejected accusations from the United States that it has been shipping arms to the Shia Houthi rebels in Yemen, according to media reports yesterday.
A US admiral said on Thursday that warships from the US Navy and allied nations had intercepted four weapons shipments from Iran to the Arabian Peninsula country since April 2005. The shipments contained thousands of AK-47 assault rifles, anti-tank missiles, sniper rifles and “other pieces of other equipment, higher-end weapons systems,” said Vice Admiral Kevin Donegan. Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Bahram Ghassemi dismissed the claims.