🇾🇪 Sana’a Government Vows to Break Saudi Blockade, Warns Riyadh Against “Folly”
Yemen’s Ansar Allah-run Foreign Ministry vowed to press ahead with breaking the Saudi-led blockade and reopening Sana’a International Airport “without asking for anyone’s permission,” in a defiant statement responding to Saudi Arabia and rejecting its account of events. It came days after Ansar Allah said it repelled Saudi warplanes trying to block an Iranian civilian flight from landing in Sana’a, part of its push to break the years-long air blockade.
The ministry said Yemen has “decided to end the aggression and break the siege” and would not back down “whatever the cost,” calling the reopening of the airport a sovereign right. It said the country is still in the “early stages” of breaking the blockade.
In a pointed warning, it told Riyadh to “look to its oil fields, Aramco, Yanbu, and its ports, as well as the stock market and Vision 2030,” and to “grasp the scale of the catastrophe that would befall it should it commit any folly.”
The ministry accused Saudi Arabia of being a “Zionist tool” acting under American cover, and said the kingdom had gambled on US-Israeli attacks on Yemen and Iran to escape its obligations under an Oman-brokered peace roadmap it said Sana’a had repeatedly accepted. The roadmap, agreed in principle in December 2023 after years of Omani mediation, was meant to fully lift the blockade, pay public-sector salaries, and set a timetable for a Saudi withdrawal and a political settlement, but it was never formally implemented. The ministry said Riyadh, not Sana’a, was stalling on advancing the plan.
The statement recalled that the Saudi-led coalition has carried out more than a quarter-million airstrikes across Yemen over 11 years, killing tens of thousands and wounding hundreds of thousands, and said Saudi warplanes nearly caused a “major massacre” by trying to block the Sana’a flight before Yemeni forces responded.
A de facto ceasefire has largely held since 2022, but the Saudi-led, US-backed blockade has never fully lifted, sustaining one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.