Ansarullah Leader: Saudis Open Airspace to ‘Israelis’, Maintain Aerial Blockade on Yemen

By Staff, Agencies

Leader of Yemen’s Ansarullah resistance movement Sayyed Abdul Malik Badreddine al-Houthi lambasted Saudi Arabia for allowing ‘Israeli’ flights to cross over its airspace while traveling to or from the United Arab Emirates, arguing that the controversial measure comes as the Riyadh regime has maintained a tight all-out blockade on war-torn Yemen.

“While Saudi Arabia maintains a blockade on Yemen’s airspace, the Riyadh regime opened the skies of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina for the ‘Israeli’ prime minister [Naftali Bennett] to fly to the UAE,” Sayyed al-Houthi said at a meeting with several visiting Yemeni tribal delegations in the capital Sana’a on Sunday evening.

Bennett met the UAE’s de facto ruler on December 13. He became the first Zionist official to publicly visit the Gulf state, more than a year after the two sides agreed to establish formal relations.

The UAE was the first of four Arab countries which agreed to normalize ties with the ‘Israeli’ occupation entity under US-brokered deals in 2020.

Elsewhere in his remarks, Sayyed al-Houthi praised meetings among Yemeni tribes and said such gatherings will help cement relations among all strata of the society in the face of the Saudi war.

He underlined that fraternity and understanding among Yemeni people should be promoted and those who pursue divisive plots must be avoided and disregarded.

Saudi Arabia, backed by the United States and regional allies, launched the war on Yemen in March 2015, with the goal of bringing the government of former Yemeni president Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi back to power and crushing the Ansarullah movement.

The war has left hundreds of thousands of Yemenis dead, and displaced millions more. It has also destroyed Yemen’s infrastructure and spread famine and infectious diseases there, deepening the world’s worst humanitarian crisis day by day.

Despite heavily-armed Saudi Arabia’s incessant bombardment of the impoverished country, the Yemeni armed forces and the Popular Committees have grown steadily in strength against the Saudi invaders and left Riyadh and its allies bogged down in the country.