The spokesman for Yemen’s Houthi Ansarullah movement has denounced Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) over submission to Israel, saying the regime will not engage in any military confrontation in the Middle East as long as Riyadh and Abu Dhabi act as its proxies and wage wars on its behalf.
“As long as the Saudi and UAE regimes fight on behalf of the Zionist regime and spend millions of dollars in its stead, the latter will not engage in any war in the region,” Mohammed Abdul-Salam said in an exclusive interview with London-based and Arabic-language Nabaa television news network on Tuesday evening.
He noted that the United States, together with Saudi Arabia and the UAE, decided to launch a devastating military campaign against Yemen after realizing that the country was seeking to assert its independence.
“Had the September 21 Revolution (the 2014 popular uprising that toppled the Saudi-backed government of former Yemeni president Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi) not broken out, the Americans would have put Yemen in the line to normalize relations with Israel,” Abdul-Salam pointed out.
“Before the 21 Revolution, there were more than 120 American Marines deployed to the US embassy in Sana’a. They had a special regiment at the airport, and were in control of al-Anad Air Base [in Yemen’s southwestern province of Lahij],” he said.
The senior Yemeni official went on to say that the Palestinian cause and the anti-Israel resistance front had long been targeted and constrained by the Arab regimes that lately normalized ties with Israel.
“Normalization had been in the works secretly, and the US administration simply decided to make it public. History will remember traitors in the worst possible form. Those who scrambled to make friends with Israel will ultimately end up in a very terrible situation,” Abdul-Salam said.
The UAE and Bahrain recently signed contentious US-mediated normalization deals with Israel.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu signed the deals with Emirati Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan and Bahrain's Foreign Minister Abdullatif Al Zayani during an official ceremony hosted by President Donald Trump at the White House on September 15.
Palestinians, who seek an independent state in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, with East Jerusalem as its capital, view the deals as betrayal of their cause.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas protested the normalization deals with Israel, saying they will be fruitless as long as the United States and the Israeli regime do not recognize the rights of the Palestinian nation and refuse to resolve the issue of Palestinian refugees.
Elsewhere in his remarks on Tuesday evening, Abdul-Salam highlighted the capabilities of the Yemeni Armed Forces in defending the country against Saudi-led military aggression, stressing that Yemenis have well resisted the onslaught.
“At the beginning of the aggression, we had neither a place nor the ability to manufacture a drone or a single missile. Our people put up resistance against the aggression, and our missile force, air defenses as well as other military units have now developed many capabilities,” he said.
Saudi Arabia and a number of its regional allies launched the war on Yemen in March 2015, with the goal of bringing Hadi’s government back to power.
The US-based Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), a nonprofit conflict-research organization, estimates that the war has claimed more than 100,000 lives for more than the past five years.
The Houthi movement, backed by the armed forces, has been defending Yemen against the Saudi-led alliance, preventing the aggressors from fulfilling their objectives.