Alwaght- The European Parliament has voted in favor of a resolution to ban selling weapons to Saudi Arabia as a result of accusations of the Kingdom’s war crimes in Yemen.
The officials also voted in favor of sending urgent humanitarian aid to Yemen and called for finding a Political solution to the Yemen crisis. Some 539 European Parliament MPs voted in favor of the resolution, 13 voted against it, while 81 abstained.
The parliament “condemns in the strongest terms the ongoing violence in Yemen and all attacks against civilians and civilian infrastructure, which constitute war crimes,” the Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) said in their statement.
Referring to a similar resolution from February last year, the lawmakers called on EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini to launch an initiative to impose an EU arms embargo against the Riyadh regime “given the serious allegations of breaches of international humanitarian law by Saudi Arabia in Yemen.”
The UK, France, Germany and Greece are known to have struck major arms deals with Saudi Arabia in the course of the war, which began in 2015.
The MEPs also expressed “grave concern at the alarming deterioration of the humanitarian situation in Yemen,” referring to civilian deaths resulting from the years-long Saudi war and an outbreak of deadly diseases such as cholera and diphtheria.
The Saudi-led military coalition has been continuously pounding Yemen since March 2015 in an attempt to crush the popular Ansarullah movement and reinstate the former fugitive president, Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, a staunch ally of the regime in Riyadh. Over 13,000 Yemenis, mostly civilians, including women and children, have been killed in the Saudi-led aggression.
International human rights organizations have accused Riyadh of commuting war crimes in Yemen.
The situation in Yemen is going from bad to worse with senior UN officials warning that the country is facing the world's largest famine in decades. The World Food Program says of a population of 26 million, some 17 million Yemenis do not know where their next meal is coming from and seven million are totally dependent on food aid.
