SANAA: The Yemeni government set terms Thursday for ending a deadly three-day-old offensive against rebels in the northern mountains, including word on the fate of six Europeans missing since June.
A government security committee said the rebels must evacuate all government offices they have occupied, hand in ammunition and equipment and free their prisoners.
The committee also demanded information on the whereabouts of the five German and one British expatriates. They were seized along with three women — two Germans and a South Korean — who were later found dead. The government accuses the rebels of holding the hostages, which they deny, accusing the government of using that as a pretext to attack them.
Tanks and warplanes pounded rebel strongholds for a third day on Thursday while exchanges of fire on the outskirts of the provincial capital Saada left dozens of casualties, provincial officials said.
The rebels dismissed the government terms for peace as a mere “misleading of public opinion.”
“The government does not really want to reach a proper solution,” said a statement by the Houthi rebels — named after their late commander Hussein Badr Eddin Al-Houthi, who was killed by the army in 2004.
The rebels said they do not object to a government presence in their areas.
They also rejected claims they were holding civilians as hostage, without differentiating between Yemenis and foreigners.
The statement, which said the rebels “still adhere to peace as a solution,” recalled a Qatari-brokered peace deal reached in June 2007, accusing the government of “hindering its implementation.”
The Houthis said Wednesday there had been heavy casualties among civilians, with at least 15 people killed in a strike on an open-air market near Saada. Civilians have fled their homes over the past week to safer areas in the region after clashes intensified.
The government has been engaged in an intermittent war with the rebels, who reject the current government and want to restore the Zaidi rule overthrown in a 1962 coup. Thousands of people have been killed since the conflict first erupted in 2004.
