From the Liveblog of
Tuesday, February 11, 2025
UN says staff member has died in custody of Yemen’s Houthi rebels
The United Nations World Food Program (WFP) says that a staff member held captive by Houthi rebels in Yemen has died.
“WFP is grief-stricken and outraged about the death of a staff member while in detention in northern Yemen,” the agency says in a statement on X.
He was identified as a Yemeni staff member “arbitrarily detained by local authorities since 23 January,” though the circumstances of his death were not specified.
The employee, who WFP said had worked for the UN since 2017, left behind a wife and two children.
The United Nations announced the suspension Monday of its activities in Yemen’s Saada region, a Huthi stronghold, after the rebels detained multiple personnel there this year.
The Iran-backed Houthi have arrested dozens of staffers from the UN and other humanitarian organizations, most of them since the middle of 2024, as Yemen’s decade-long civil war grinds on.
In January alone, the rebels detained eight UN workers, including six in Saada, which adds to the dozens of NGO and UN personnel detained since June.
The Houthi claimed the June arrests included “an American-Israeli spy network” operating under the cover of humanitarian organizations — allegations emphatically rejected by the UN Human Rights Office.
