(MENAFN- The Peninsula) Yemen's main warring factions endorsed a UN-brokered humanitarian truce from midnight although heavy fighting on the ground and Saudi air strikes continued.
The week-long truce will end with Ramadan and aims to get aid to some 21 million Yemenis. All sides said they hoped a full ceasefire would follow.
A Saudi Arabia-led coalition of Arab states has been bombing the Iranian-allied Houthi rebel movement since March 26 to restore to power Yemen's President Abd-Rabbu Mansor Hadi, who has fled to Riyadh. Over 3,000 people have died since then.
The dominant Houthis shelled residential areas in the southern port of Aden overnight and pushed further into Yemen's eastern Hadramawt desert, the centre of the country's oil resources, fighting tribal militiamen, a local official said.
The Saudi-led campaign targeted the capital Sana'a yesterday and hit mainly central and southern cities overnight. Earlier, an air strike hit a school where internally displaced people have taken refuge in the southern province of Lahj, killing nine and wounding 14, residents said.
"We hope the truce will be the beginning of the end of the Saudi aggression and the end of the violation of United Nations conventions the war of aggression on Yemen has seen," Houthi leader Mohammed Al Houthi said in a statement.
However, in a televised speech, Abdel-Malek Al Houthi, leader of Houthi Ansarullah group, doubted that the ceasefire would hold. "As for the truce, we don't have big hope in its success, because its success is linked to the commitment of the Saudi regime and its allies.
"Our experience in the previous truce was bitter and unfortunate. It became a truce only for the media, but what was happening on the ground was something else, the daily air strikes continued."
He said if the Saudi-led strikes continued, "we will take steps to face this aggression." He did not elaborate.
The party of Yemen's ex-president Ali Abdullah Saleh, whose loyalists in the military have been a major ally in the Houthis' advance in the south, also welcomed the truce.
UN envoy Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed clinched the deal after discussions with Houthi leaders and said more thorny political discussions would wait until after the humanitarian work was done.
Yemen's government has demanded that the Houthis comply with a UN Security Council Resolution of April which called on them to quit seized land and release prisoners.
"We must distinguish between the so-called humanitarian truce insisted on by the UN for a while and what we insist on and hope for: That there will be a full truce with a comprehensive ceasefire, including the withdrawal of forces," Yemeni Foreign Minister Riyadh Yasseen told state-owned Saudi Ekhbariya TV.
The Houthis do not agree to those demands and view their takeover of the capital in September and spread across the country as part of a revolution against a corrupt government backed by the West.
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