DUBAI: The United Nations’s World Food Programme (WFP) said Tuesday that a staff member held captive by the Houthis in Yemen has died.
“WFP is grief-stricken and outraged about the death of a staff member while in detention in northern Yemen,” the agency said in a statement on X.
He was identified as a Yemeni staff member “arbitrarily detained by local authorities since 23 January,” though the circumstances of his death were not specified.
The employee, who WFP said had worked for the UN since 2017, left behind a wife and two children.
The United Nations announced the suspension Monday of its activities in Yemen’s Saada region, a Houthi stronghold, after the militia detained multiple personnel there this year.
The Iran-backed Houthis have arrested dozens of staffers from the UN and other humanitarian organizations, most of them since the middle of 2024, as Yemen’s decade-long civil war grinds on.
In January alone, the Houthis detained eight UN workers, including six in Saada, which adds to the dozens of NGO and UN personnel detained since June.
The Houthis claimed the June arrests included “an American-Israeli spy network” operating under the cover of humanitarian organizations — allegations emphatically rejected by the UN Human Rights Office.
A decade of war has plunged Yemen into one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, according to the UN.
UN says staff member has died in custody of Houthis
https://arab.news/9f2us
UN says staff member has died in custody of Houthis
- “WFP is grief-stricken and outraged about the death of a staff member while in detention in northern Yemen,” the agency said
US lawmakers press Israel to probe strike on reporters in Lebanon
- “The IDF has made no effort, none, to seriously investigate this incident,” Welch said
- Collins called for Washington to publicly acknowledge the attack in which an American citizen was injured
WASHINGTON: Several Democratic lawmakers called Thursday for the Israeli and US governments to fully investigate a deadly 2023 attack by the Israeli military on journalists in southern Lebanon.
The October 13, 2023 airstrike killed Reuters videographer Issam Abdallah and wounded six other reporters, including two from AFP — video journalist Dylan Collins and photographer Christina Assi, who lost her leg.
“We expect the Israeli government to conduct an investigation that meets the international standards and to hold accountable those people who did this,” Senator Peter Welch told a news conference, with Collins by his side.
The lawmaker from Collins’s home state of Vermont said he had been pushing for answers for two years, first from the administration of Democratic president Joe Biden and now from the Republican White House of Donald Trump.
The Israeli government has “stonewalled at every single turn,” Welch added.
“With the Israeli government, we have been extremely patient, and we have done everything we reasonably can to obtain answers and accountability,” he said.
“The IDF has made no effort, none, to seriously investigate this incident,” Welch said, referring to the Israeli military, adding that it has told his office its investigation into the incident is closed.
Collins called for Washington to publicly acknowledge the attack in which an American citizen was injured.
“But I’d also like them to put pressure on their greatest ally in the Middle East, the Israeli government, to bring the perpetrators to account,” he said, echoing the lawmakers who called the attack a “war crime.”
“We’re not letting it go,” Vermont congresswoman Becca Balint said. “It doesn’t matter how long they stonewall us.”
AFP conducted an independent investigation which concluded that two Israeli 120mm tank shells were fired from the Jordeikh area in Israel.
The findings were corroborated by other international probes, including investigations conducted by Reuters, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders.
Unlike Welch’s assertion Thursday that the Israeli probe was over, the IDF told AFP in October that “findings regarding the event have not yet been concluded.”
