Yemen Monitor/Newsroom:
The UN Security Council is scheduled to hold an open briefing session today, Monday, under the agenda item “Threats to international peace and security.”
According to a briefing published by SCR, the meeting was scheduled after Israel requested an urgent meeting of the Security Council in a letter dated December 24, referring to several recent attacks carried out by the Houthi group.
It indicates that the Under-Secretary-General for the Middle East, Asia and the Pacific, Muhammad Khalid Khiyari, is expected to provide a briefing.
A representative of civil society is also expected to provide a briefing, and Israel is expected to participate under Rule 37 of the Council’s provisional rules of procedure.
The briefing predicted that Khiyari and Council members would express concern about recent developments and the risk of further escalation in the region and call for restraint. In this regard, some may express concern about the inflammatory rhetoric from both sides (the Houthi group and the Israeli occupation).
The briefing suggested that Council members would present different views on the situation and that members closest to Israel, including the three countries (France, the United Kingdom, and the US), would strongly condemn the Houthi attacks against Israel. Some of these members may express concern about the transfer of weapons to the Houthis, including from Iran. In Israel’s letter to the Security Council on December 24, Israel called on the Council to condemn “Iran’s continued support and supply of weapons” to the Houthis, asserting that this violates international law and numerous Security Council resolutions.
In a letter to the Council on December 24, Iran asserted that Israel is trying to “justify and legitimize its past and future aggressive actions against the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Yemen by fabricating baseless allegations against the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
It states: Other members of the Council, including Russia and China, may be more hesitant to condemn the Houthis and are likely to directly criticize Israeli attacks in Yemen. These members may also condemn the retaliatory strikes in Yemen carried out by the US and the UK in response to Houthi attacks on commercial ships in the Red Sea. Several such strikes occurred last month, including a strike carried out by US Central Command on December 21 against a missile storage facility and a command and control facility run by the Houthis in Sana’a.
It said: Many Council members are likely to be interested in what the UN official states in his briefing about the potential humanitarian consequences of Israeli airstrikes. There may be expressions of concern about the potential impacts on food security, as up to 85 percent of Yemen’s food supply is provided through commercial imports, according to the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
