It was Saleh’s first response to the United Nations Security Council measure last week calling on him to adopt the blueprint drafted by neighboring Gulf states for a transition to early parliamentary and presidential elections after a new opposition-led Cabinet is formed and Saleh relinquishes the presidency.

Saleh has already rejected the plan three times despite escalating protests against his 33-year-long autocratic rule, saying he would only transfer power into “safe hands.”

“The Yemeni president ... expressed his readiness to sit down immediately at the dialogue table with the Joint Meeting Parties (opposition parties) and its partners to complete the dialogue over the operational mechanism for the (Gulf) initiative as quickly as possible and to reach the final signing of the initiative and its immediate implementation, leading to early presidential elections on a date agreed upon by all,” said a statement carried by the Yemeni news agency SABA.

Meanwhile, two Yemeni soldiers were shot dead on Monday and three suspected militants were killed the night before in two sets of clashes in the south of the turbulent Arabian Peninsula state, security and tribal sources said.

Fighting has also resurged in the capital.

Monday’s incident took place in the commercial port of Aden, which lies east of a strategic shipping strait where some 3 million barrels of oil pass daily.

“Armed groups driving a car opened fire with machine guns on a group of government troops charged with guarding commercial warehouses,” a security source told Reuters.

“Security forces exchanged fire for a short period of time with the armed groups leading to the death of two and the injury of two... The armed groups fled to an unknown place,” the source added. Eyewitnesses said the fighting had also involved hand grenades and that a government car had been burnt.

Yemen is at risk of falling into a deeper humanitarian crisis akin to Somalia’s descent as political unrest has made it more difficult for many struggling Yemenis to afford food, United Nations officials said on Monday.

“Yemen is on the verge of a true humanitarian disaster ... it’s at risk of becoming the new Somalia on the political and humanitarian level,” Geert Cappelaere, the UN Children’s Fund’s representative for Yemen, told a news briefing.

“Over 50 percent of children under the age of five are suffering from chronic malnutrition in Yemen today,” he added.

Like other Gulf Arab nations, Yemen relays heavily on food imports as only 2.5 percent of land is arable, said Lubna Alaman, country director for the UN’s World Food Program (WFP) in Yemen.

“At the very best Yemen can only produce around 30 percent of its food needs, because of limited arable land which makes it very reliant on imports,” Alaman told Reuters on the sidelines of the news briefing.

Access to food is the main challenge, she added.

“It’s not a matter of food production, it’s access, people are not making enough money to buy food that’s in the markets, so increasing the employment rate is the sustainable solution.”