The Arab coalition has also stepped up its air raids in Yemen since peace talks collapsed.
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Yemen’s Houthi Ansarullah movement and the General People’s Congress (GPC) party of the former president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, form the council, which is tasked with handling the country.
In a reply to a call by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry for Houthis to surrender their ballistic missiles, Houthi spokesman Mohammed Abdulsalam wrote in a message posted on Facebook that “whoever has a greedy eye on our weapons, we will have a greedy eye on his life”.
Kerry’s new peace road came after his meeting this week in Jeddah with foreign ministers of British and Arab Gulf states to end Yemen civil war.
On Saturday, a rocket fired from Yemen killed a three-year-old boy in Najran, where shelling struck a power station a day earlier.
On Saturday, a statement from the exiled government carried by the Saba news agency said: “The government is prepared to deal positively with any peaceful solutions…including an initial welcoming of the ideas resulting from the meeting in Jeddah that included the foreign secretaries of the US, the United Kingdom and Gulf states”.
The key new element in the new plan is a suggestion that the GCC states and the legitimate government of Yemen need not insist on all these conditions being fulfilled before the formation of a new unity government.
But despite all this diplomacy created to give Al Houthis some encouragement to join the peace talks, they chose to shell a target in Saudi Arabia, which is a deliberately provocative act.
The Houthis are yet to respond to the proposal.
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The war in Yemen, which has killed more than 6,500 people and displaced some three million, has dragged on for 18 months.
