Cairo: Egypt will host an international conference in March to coordinate humanitarian aid for Yemen, which has been devastated by a civil war, a minister in Yemen’s Gulf-backed government said on Tuesday.
The United Nations said last week that at least 10,000 people had been killed in the past 18 months. It said some 14 million of Yemen’s 26 million population needed food aid and seven million were suffering from food insecurity.
“We are now preparing for a conference ... to be held here in the city of Sharm Al Shaikh ... We are preparing for this conference fully so we can go to the aid organisations and civil society organisations and many donors,” Abdul Raqib Fateh, minister of local administration, told a news conference in Cairo.
Egypt, which supports the Gulf-backed government, has yet to comment about the conference and its aims.
UN-sponsored peace talks ended in August without agreement, and the collapse in negotiations was followed by stepped-up fighting across the Arabian Peninsula country.
In the news conference held at the Yemeni embassy in Cairo, ministers from the Saudi-backed government said the conflict had taken a heavy toll.
At the press conference in Cairo, Fateh accused the UN agencies, which are mostly based in the Al Houthi-held Sana’a, of “working from their offices” and not reflecting events on the ground — remarks that echoed recent Saudi accusations of UN’s bias in the Yemeni civil war.