Saudi Arabia, UAE announce $500 million in aid to Yemen amid ongoing Saudi-UAE-Iran proxy war

Saudi Arabia and the UAE have both been accused of contributing to the humanitarian crisis in Yemen, where millions risk starvation.

Following reports of a ceasefire in the besieged Yemeni city of Hodeida, both countries said they would give $250 million each to the UN in response to the food crisis, said Abdullah Rabeeah, general supervisor at King Salman Humanitarian Aid and Relief Centre. 

He added that donations would go through the United Nations as well as other international and local aid groups and aid 10 million Yemenis. 

Rabeeah spoke at a joint news conference in Riyadh with UAE Minister of State for International Cooperation Reem al-Hashimy.

The latest aid package comes after the two countries and Kuwait offered $1.25 billion to the UN's humanitarian response plan in Yemen for 2018, according to Rabeeah.

Saudi Arabia and the UAE began their military intervention in the Yemen war in 2015 to bolster Yemeni President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi after the Houthis took over the capital, Sanaa. 

Both the military coalition backing the government and the Iran-backed Houthi rebels stand accused of acts that could amount to war crimes.

The Saudi-led coalition has been accused of the calculated starvation of Yemeni civilians by deliberately bombing food production and agriculture, a report said last month.

Saudi Arabia has come under increased international pressure over its deadly war in Yemen following the grisly murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Mohammed bin Salman, who has been accused of ordering the killing, is considered the chief architect of the deadly war in Yemen.

The Saudi coalition has been repeatedly blamed for bombing civilians, including a strike on a wedding hall in the Red Sea coastal town of Mokha in September 2015, in which 131 people were killed.

In October 2016, a coalition airstrike killed 140 people at a funeral in the rebel-held capital, Sanaa.

In another recent attack, forty children were among 51 people killed in a Saudi-led coalition airstrike on a bus in rebel-held northern Yemen in August.

The World Health Organization says more than 10,000 people have been killed in Yemen since the coalition intervention in March 2015, but rights groups believe the toll may be as much as five times higher.

The war in Yemen - already one of the world's most impoverished countries - has left the nation on the edge of mass starvation in what the UN calls the world's worst humanitarian crisis.

The UN is already providing food aid to some eight million Yemenis but that number could reach 14 million next year, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres warned last week.