The International Committee of the Red Cross announced Saturday the beginning of the second day of the prisoner exchange process between the Yemeni government and the Huthi insurgency, the result of negotiations with the Saudi and Omani delegation that arrived in the country last weekend, which marked a turning point in the bloody war that has been ravaging the country for a decade.
»We started the second day of the operation to transfer detainees,» the ICRC made known on its Twitter account. At the moment, two ICRC planes have already landed in Yemen’s capital, Sana’a, with 60 released detainees, while a plane with 20 detainees on board is approaching the Saudi capital, Riyadh.
On Friday, a first flight with 125 people left Aden, the seat of Yemen’s recognized government, for Sana’a, under insurgent control, while a further 35 people flew the other way. Shortly after, another 124 people were flown from Aden to Sana’a and 34 in the opposite direction.
The prisoner exchange, which involves the exchange of approximately 900 people, began yesterday, several days late and following an agreement reached on March 20 in the Swiss capital, Bern, at a meeting co-chaired by the ICRC and the office of the UN Secretary General’s special envoy for Yemen, Hans Grundberg.
The war in Yemen has plunged what was once one of the world’s poorest countries into the worst humanitarian catastrophe in the world today, according to the United Nations. More than 21 million Yemenis – two-thirds of the population – will need humanitarian aid this year, and 17 million of them will have to receive it urgently to survive.
The conflict has left almost 380,000 people dead – more than 85,000 of them children – either from the fighting or from hunger and disease, to which must be added four million displaced persons, according to UN agencies.
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
