A Saudi failure to meet those demands should result in consequences, the senators wrote in a Wednesday letter to Biden that CNN has seen, “to include pending weapons sales, military cooperation, the provision of maintenance for war planes and spare parts, as well as U.S.-Saudi ties more broadly.”
“Immediate and decisive action must be taken to end the ongoing blockade of fuel imports that is exacerbating the growing humanitarian crisis,” sixteen Democratic senators wrote in a letter led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. “The United States has diplomatic and economic leverage to compel Saudi Arabia to end its callous blockade of Yemen and we must use it before more lives are needlessly lost.”
A CNN investigation in March found that Saudi warships were preventing oil tankers from docking at the key rebel controlled Hudaydah port, including 14 vessels that had gained approval from a United Nations clearance mechanism to berth.A handful of those tankers were given permission to dock at the port by Yemen’s internationally recognized government — which is backed by Saudi Arabia and its military — in a move that was praised by the US State Department. However, humanitarian agencies in Yemen told CNN last month that the fuel was nowhere near enough to deliver aid to millions of people in the country’s north.
‘Cruel and senseless’
The senators wrote that the block on the “importation of commercial fuel into northern Yemen needed by nearly two-thirds of the Yemeni population … has negatively impacted food transporters and processors, hospitals, schools, and businesses.”
A State Department spokesperson told CNN last month that “there is no blockade” of Hudaydah, saying that it “remains open and commercial imports of food and other commodities are moving through the port at normal or above average rates, along with goods imported…
