Yemen: Serious risk of returning to large-scale conflict - Special Envoy | United Nations

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Briefing by Hans Grundberg, UN Special Envoy for Yemen, on the situation in the Middle East. In his address to the Council, the Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for Yemen Hans Grundberg said, “Yemen today faces a more serious risk of return to large-scale conflict than at any point since the 2022 UN-mediated truce.” Grundberg noted there has been “an intensification of military activity along frontlines, with recent attacks by Ansar Allah in Ma’rib, Hadramawt, Mokha and beyond causing casualties among both military personnel and civilians.” “With regional trade and energy flows already under intense pressure from the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz,” he said, Ansar Allah’s attacks on commercial vessels in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden “risk deepening Yemen’s entanglement with the wider regional confrontation.” The Special Envoy said, “for four years, and well beyond its formal expiry, the truce kept Yemen’s front lines relatively quiet. Remarkably, even through the regional turmoil since 2023, this calm mostly held inside Yemen.” He emphasized that the truce “was designed as a means, not an end,” and its primary objective “was to open the way to negotiations on a comprehensive settlement of the conflict.” Grundberg said, “a return to large-scale fighting in Yemen now would come at an unforgiving moment: with Yemen’s state institutions fragmented by over a decade of conflict, its economy left with little margin to absorb another shock, and the wider region engulfed by war.” For Yemenis, he said, “renewed war would once again place every ordinary ambition to study, to work, to build a life, at the mercy of the fighting. It would mean a new generation sent to front lines, instead of having the chance to reimagine and remake their country’s future.”


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