Yemen's government will not allow Houthis to obstruct humanitarian aid's arrival through Hudaida‏

 The Saudi-backed Yemeni government will not allow its Houthi foes to keep the Red Sea port of Hudaida, the information minister said, underlining its intent to remove the vital aid delivery point from the control of the Iran-aligned group, according to The Daily Star .

The United Nations has proposed that Hudaida, where 80 percent of food imports arrive, should be handed to a neutral party, to smooth the flow of humanitarian relief and prevent the port being engulfed by Yemen’s 2-year-old war.

The government of President Abed Rabbou Mansour Hadi accuses the Houthis of using the port to smuggle in weapons and of collecting custom duties on goods, which they use to finance the war. The Houthis deny this.

“The government will not accept that Houthi control of Hudaida port continues, or that humanitarian aid is obstructed or that its revenues are used for the military effort while state employees have not been paid for 10 months,” the minister, Moammar al-Iryani, told Reuters on a visit to Cairo.

Iryani repeated that the government had accepted a proposal by U.N. envoy to Yemen, Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, to hand over control of Hudaida to a neutral party as a way of avoiding military action.

“The government has in principle accepted Ould Cheikh Ahmed’s proposals regarding Hudaida out of a feeling of responsibility for all the people of Yemen, but the Houthis have rejected them,” he said.

The Houthis have signaled they are ready to discuss the move as part of measures that would involve assurances that long-delayed salaries of state workers be paid and the resumption of commercial flights from the capital Sanaa.

Yemen has been devastated by more then two years of civil war in which Hadi’s government, backed by an Arab-led coalition, is fighting to drive the Houthis out of cities they seized in 2014 and 2015 in a rapid rise to national power.

Efforts to broker fresh U.N.-sponsored peace talks are stalled, blocked by disagreement over demands that the Houthis hand over Hudaida to a neutral party and Houthi demands that the government pay civil servants their back pay.

The Houthis are also demanding that the coalition, which controls Yemen’s airspace, allow commercial flights to resume from Sanaa airport.

Iryani said that an attack by the Houthis on Mokha port last week was an attempt to obstruct plans to rehabilitate the facility and prepare it to be an alternative to Hudaida.

The Yemen war has killed over 10,000 people, destroyed Yemen’s infrastructure and pushed the country to the brink of famine. There is no sign the conflict will end soon.

A cholera outbreak has killed some 1,900 more people since April and infected over 400,000. The number is expected to rise to over 600,000 by the end of the year, according to International Committee of the Red Cross estimates.