UAE pledges $500m for Yemen at Geneva meet

United Nations chief Antonio Guterres said donors on Tuesday pledged $2.6 billion in aid for Yemen at a conference in Geneva.

The UAE and Saudi Arabia announced a contribution of $500 million each, Britain promised $264 million, Kuwait $250 million and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) $24 million.

The promise was 30 per cent more than 2018 but short of what is needed to address the world’s most urgent humanitarian crisis.

Meanwhile, a peace deal in Yemen’s main port city of Hodeidah appears to have stalled again despite UN efforts to salvage the pact intended to clear the way for wider negotiations to end the war, sources involved in the discussions said.

Guterres admitted that progress has been slow in implementing a troop withdrawal in Hodeidah.

“It is not very clear why they cancelled the withdrawal as the Houthi leader himself said they are ready to redeploy unilaterally,” one of the sources said.

Other sources said deep mistrust among the parties remained the main obstacle to forming a local authority that would run the city and ports according to the truce agreement reached at UN-led peace talks in December.

Houthi officials did not respond to a request for comment.

An official in the Saudi-backed government of Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi said the Houthis do not want peace.

The office of UN special envoy Martin Griffiths, who arrived in the Houthi-held capital Sanaa on Tuesday to salvage the deal, declined to comment.

Michael Aron, Britain’s ambassador to Yemen, said in Geneva he hoped the withdrawal would take place this week. “It really has to happen, if there isn’t implementation of Stockholm, we’re not back to square one, we’re back to square minus one,” he said.

Guterres announced that a UN team on Tuesday visited a grains facility caught on a frontline where the World Food Programme has enough wheat to feed 3.7 million Yemenis for a month.

“For the first time in six months, finally it was possible for us to reach the so-called Red Sea mills,” he said. “So at least slowly some progress is being made.”