The “plans to storm Yemen’s biggest port of Hudaydah give rise to serious concerns,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a statement published on the ministry’s official website on Monday.
She added that battles in the area “would not only inevitably lead to a mass exodus of the [local] population but would also de facto cut the [Yemeni] capital of Sana’a from… food and humanitarian aid supplies.”
Zakharova described the humanitarian situation in Yemen as “catastrophic.” She also condemned a March 10 Saudi-led airstrike on a marketplace in the al-Khawkhah district of Hudaydah.
Twenty six people, including 20 civilians and six Houthi Ansarullah fighters, were killed in the raid, according to AFP.
Meanwhile, nearly a dozen civilians sustained injuries when Saudi fighter jets carried out an aerial attack against a residential area in northern Yemen using internationally-banned cluster bombs.