Yemeni pro-government forces backed by Saudi-led coalition warplanes advanced inside rebel-held Hodeidah yesterday, leaving hundreds of thousands of civilians bracing for fighting in the streets of the Red Sea port city.  
After a week of intense battles with the Houthi insurgents on the outskirts of Hodeidah, loyalist troops reached residential neighbourhoods, using bulldozers to remove concrete road blocks installed by the rebels.
Troops of the United Arab Emirates-trained Giants Brigade armed with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades rolled down the city’s streets in pickup trucks bearing their brigade logo spray-painted in red, a journalist working for AFP reported.  
Three military sources said that government forces and their coalition allies were edging towards the city’s vital docks through which nearly 80% of Yemen’s commercial imports and practically all UN-supervised humanitarian aid pass.
 Columns headed for the port advanced 2km along the main road from the interior to the east and 3km along the coast road from the south, the sources said. “Either the rebels surrender the city peacefully or we take it by force, but we will take it either way,” commander Moammar al-Saidy told AFP.  
Coalition warplanes bombed rebel positions as the ground forces advanced. At least 47 Houthi fighters were killed, hospital sources in rebel-held areas told AFP.
 Medics at hospitals in government-held territory said 11 soldiers were killed.  The deaths bring the overall toll from seven days of fighting to 250 combatants killed – 197 rebels and 53 loyalists. Aid group Save the Children has confirmed the death of one civilian, a 15-year-old boy who died of shrapnel wounds sustained just outside the city.
 The Houthis have controlled Hodeidah since 2014 when they overran the capital Sanaa and then swept though much of the rest of the country, triggering Saudi-led military intervention the following year and a devastating war of attrition. The rebels have since been driven out of virtually all of the south and much of the Red Sea coast.
 Government forces launched their offensive to retake Hodeidah in June backed by significant numbers of Emirati ground troops. Their advance into the city of some 600,000 people has been slowed by trenches and minefields dug by the rebels around their last major coastal stronghold, an army source said. 
Rebel chief Abdulmalik al-Houthi vowed late on Wednesday that his fighters would never surrender to the Saudi-led coalition despite being seriously outnumbered. 
“The enemy benefits from its numbers, which it has increased even further to pressure the city of Hodeidah,” he said. “Does the enemy think that penetrating this or that area, or seizing this or that area, means we will be convinced that we should surrender and hand over control?
 “This is not happening and will not happen ever.”
 North Hodeidah is still under total rebel control. While some shops had shuttered their windows, a vegetable market was bustling as armed men could be seen patrolling the area. Pedestrians and cars poured into Jizan Road, a main street in the city’s north.  Human rights groups have voiced fears that a protracted battle for the city will exact heavy civilian casualties and force a halt to vital food shipments. UN agencies say some 14mn people are at risk of famine in Yemen, which they have described as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
 Aid groups have appealed to both the rebels and the coalition to provide safe passage for fleeing civilians and halt fighting around hospitals.
 Yesterday, Amnesty International accused the rebels of “deliberate militarisation” of one of Hodeidah’s main hospitals. The human rights group said the Houthis had posted snipers on the roof of a hospital in the May 22 district, calling the action a “stomach-churning development”. The World Health Organization (WHO) and International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) warned that the fighting had neared health centres, including the city’s biggest hospital. “We’re running out of words to describe how wretched the situation is,” said Fabrizio Carboni, ICRC’s Middle East director.
 Nearly 10,000 Yemenis have been killed since 2015, according to the WHO. Human rights groups say the real death toll may be five times as high. Multiple UN-sponsored efforts to broker a power-sharing agreement between the government and the rebels have failed.  
A UN push to convene peace talks in Switzerland collapsed in September as the rebels stayed away, saying they had not received sufficient guarantees for their safe passage.

UN now aims for Yemen talks by end of the year

United Nations Yemen envoy Martin Griffiths is no longer aiming to convene the country’s warring parties for peace talks by the end of this month and will instead try to bring them together by the end of the year, a UN spokesman said yesterday. Griffiths, who is due to brief the Security Council on Nov 16, is trying to salvage peace talks that collapsed in September. He said in a statement last week that he hoped to bring the parties to the negotiating table within a month.
However, UN spokesman Farhan Haq said the goal now was for political consultations before the end of the year. A Saudi-led military coalition intervened in Yemen in 2015, backing government forces fighting the Iran-allied Houthi group. Iran has denied supplying weapons to the Houthis. The United States and Britain last week stepped up calls for an end to the nearly four-year war that has driven impoverished Yemen to the verge of famine, raising pressure on Saudi Arabia as it faces a global outcry over the murder of a prominent Saudi journalist in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on Oct 2. “There’s always different challenges to bringing the parties together,” Haq told reporters. “What we’re trying to do is clear up any issues so that we can get a successful round of talks as soon as possible.”
An attempt to hold peace talks in Geneva in September was abandoned after three days of waiting for the Houthi delegation. The Houthis had said they wanted guarantees from the United Nations that their plane would not have to stop in Djibouti for inspection by the Saudi-led coalition. They also wanted the plane to evacuate some of their wounded to Oman or Europe.
British foreign minister Jeremy Hunt said on Monday he would push for new action at the UN Security Council to try to end hostilities in Yemen and find a political solution. UN diplomats, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Britain was working with the United States on a draft resolution to stop the fighting in Yemen.