Yemeni forces repel several Saudi attacks days after ‘truce’

Days after the so-called Saudi-led coalition claimed to have halted its aggression in Yemen due to the COVID-19 outbreak, the Yemeni Army has announced that it  repelled several Saudi assaults on various fronts in just one day.

The Spokesman for the Yemeni Armed Forces Brigadier General Yahya Saree said in a tweet that the Yemen defensive operations took place from Friday morning until noon, killing and injuring dozens of enemy combatants and impeding Saudi advance.

“Three assaults took place in the Qaniyah, al-Jaribat and Nati’ regionsof the al-Bayda Province, two in the Ma'rib Province’s Sirwah region and one attack in the Qabzat district of the Taizz Province,” he said.

Saree added that Saudi mercenaries also launched seven airstrikes on separate areas in the Khab wa al-Sha'af districts in the northern al-Jawf Province.

Saudi drone downed

Also on Friday, the Yemeni forces managed to shoot down a Saudi-led drone conducting “hostile operations” over the Razeh area bordering Saudi Arabia in the Sa'ada Province, according to a military source speaking to Yemen's official Saba news agency.

The news agency also reported that a Saudi-led warship shelled the Yemeni port-city of Hudaydah, violating an ongoing UN-brokered truce in the city.

The report added that the Saudi mercenaries also shelled the encircled Yemeni city of Durayhimi near Hudaydah, killing two civilians and destroying homes.

The multiple land and aerial assaults come a few days after the Saudi-led coalition claimed it was halting military operations in Yemen in support of UN efforts to end the five-year war and avoid the outbreak of the coronavirus in war-wracked Yemen.

Saudi declares ceasefire in Yemen, then promptly breaches it with airstrikes

Saudi Arabia has violated a temporary ceasefire it had announced in its war on Yemen a few hours earlier.

The Saudi assaults, along with mass arms shipments from western countries, have, nonetheless continued despite Yemen confirming its first COVID-19 case on Friday.

War-torn Yemen reports first new coronavirus case amid poor medical sector

The case was diagnosed in the oil-producing Hadhramaut province.

Speaking a day earlier, the spokesman for Yemen's popular Ansarullah resistance movement, Mohammed Abdul-Salam, said that the so-called Saudi truce was a mere “political and media maneuver” seeking to “burnish the blood-stained image of Saudi Arabia”.

Saudi-led coalition’s ceasefire in Yemen nothing but political, media maneuver: Ansarullah

The Ansarullah movement says Saudi-led coalition’s announcement of a ceasefire in Yemen is nothing but a political and media maneuver.

“Yemenis are dying of blockade and epidemics… There can be no humanitarian truce as long as the (Saudi-led) siege continues,” Abdul-Salam said.

Saudi Arabia and a number of its regional allies launched the devastating war on Yemen in March 2015 in order to bring the country’s former president Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi back to power and crush Ansarullah.

The Saudi-led campaign was, however, brought to a standstill due to fierce Yemeni resistance.

The US-based Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), a nonprofit conflict-research organization, estimates that the war has claimed more than 100,000 lives over the past five years.

The UN says over 24 million Yemenis are in dire need of humanitarian aid, including 10 million suffering from extreme levels of hunger.

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