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The Iranian-backed Houthis have raided offices of the United Nations’ food and children’s agencies in Yemen’s capital, detaining at least one UN employee, officials said, as the rebels tightened security across Sana’a after Israel’s killing of their prime minister and several cabinet members.
Abeer Etefa, a spokesperson for the World Food Programme, said security forces raided the agencies’ offices in the Houthi-controlled capital on Sunday morning. “WFP reiterates that the arbitrary detention of humanitarian staff is unacceptable,” Etefa said.
Ammar Ammar, a spokesperson for Unicef, said there was “an ongoing situation” related to its offices in Sana’a, without providing further details.
A UN official said contacts with several other WFP and Unicef staffers were lost and that they were likely to also have been detained.
The raids were the latest in a long-running Houthi crackdown against the UN and other international organisations working in rebel-held areas in Yemen. They have detained dozens of UN staffers as well as people associated with aid groups, civil society and the now closed US embassy in Sana’a.
The UN suspended its operations in the Houthi stronghold of Saada, in northern Yemen, after the rebels detained eight UN staffers in January.
Sunday’s raids came after the killing of the Houthi prime minister and several of his cabinet in an Israeli strike on Thursday, which was a blow to the Iran-backed rebels who have launched attacks on Israel and ships in the Red Sea in relation to the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.
Among the dead were the prime minister, Ahmed al-Rahawi; the foreign minister, Gamal Amer; the deputy prime minister and minister of local development, Mohammed al-Medani; the electricity minister, Ali Seif Hassan; the tourism minister, Ali al-Yafei; and the information minister, Hashim Sharafuldin, according to two Houthi officials and the victims’ families.
Also killed was a powerful deputy interior minister, Abdel-Majed al-Murtada, the Houthi officials said. They were targeted during a “routine workshop held by the government to evaluate its activities and performance over the past year,” a Houthi statement said on Saturday, two days after the strike.
The defence minister, Mohamed Nasser al-Attefi, survived while Abdel-Karim al-Houthi, the interior minister and one of the most powerful figures in the rebel group, did not attend the Thursday meeting, the Houthi officials said.
The Houthis had attacked Israel on 21 August with a ballistic missile that its military described as the first cluster bomb the rebels had launched at Israel since 2023. The missile, which the Houthis said was aimed at Ben Gurion airport, prompted air raid sirens across central Israel and Jerusalem, forcing millions of people into shelters.
The Houthis are likely to escalate their attacks on Israel and ships in the Red Sea after they vowed in July to target merchant ships belonging to any company that does business with Israeli ports, regardless of nationality.
“Our military approach of targeting the Israeli enemy, whether with missiles, drones or a naval blockade, is continuous, steady and escalating,” Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, the group’s secretive leader, said in a televised speech on Sunday.
