News & Events

Advanced plans by Saudi Arabia to strike a peace deal with the Houthi rebels in Yemen are being jeopardised by Houthi attacks on Israel and this week’s seizure of an Israeli-linked commercial vessel in the Red Sea.

The White House says it is considering redesignating Yemen’s Houthi rebels as a “terrorist” group after they claimed the seizure of a commercial ship in the Red Sea.

Aerial attacks by the Iran-backed militia are unlikely to reach Israel at the moment, but analysts worry about anti-ship missiles and regional instability.

Both sides in Yemen’s eight-year war have accused each other of attacks that break a relative lull in fighting and jeopardise peace talks that had been gathering momentum.

On their first official visit to Saudi Arabia since the Yemen war erupted in 2014, a delegation of Houthi rebels held talks in Riyadh over a five-day period last week on a potential agreement that could hasten the end of hostilities.

Leaders of the Southern Yemen independence movement have said they have been sidelined from critical talks held in Riyadh between Saudi Arabia and Houthi rebels on the future of Yemen. They warned any peace deal cannot be imposed upon the south.

Saudi Arabia welcomed positive results from discussions to reach a road map supporting the peace process in Yemen, the kingdom’s foreign ministry said in a statement on Wednesday, after Houthi negotiators’ talks with the Saudis in Riyadh.

A leader in Yemen’s Ansarallah resistance movement, Ali al-Qahoum, confirmed that Omani-mediated negotiations between his group and Saudi Arabia are once again in motion, coming almost two weeks after it was reported that the talks had collapsed.