Ethiopia has established a committee to address humanitarian concern in the country's restive northern Tigray regional state, an Ethiopian official said on Monday. Speaking to journalists, Redwan Hussein, spokesman of a newly-established State of Emergency Task Force for the Tigray conflict, said a high-Level committee that aims to effectively respond to humanitarian concerns in Tigray regional state has been established. Hussein also said the committee will be tasked with giving on-the-ground relevant information to inform a response to any humanitarian concern raised in the region. On Friday, the Ethiopia Deputy Prime Minister, Demeke Mekonen, said his government is working to address the humanitarian concern in the country's restive Tigray regional state. Mekonen made the remarks during discussions with the diplomatic community in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa. "Humanitarian issues are our top priority, to take care of them, to manage in a very responsible and a very swift way," said the Deputy PM. "We hope to share the progress on this issue to respective organizations soon and we expect everything will be managed as planned," he further said. Since Nov. 4, the Ethiopian government had been undertaking military operations against the TPLF, the ruling party in Ethiopia's northernmost Tigray region, and now in an official war against the federal government that followed TPLF's reported attack against the Northern command of the Ethiopian Defense Force, a division that has been stationed in the region for over two decades. The Ethiopian government has been blaming the TPLF, which was one of the four coalition fronts of Ethiopia's former ruling party the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), for masterminding various treasonous acts across different parts of the country with an overarching goal of destabilizing the East African country. Three of the former four EPRDF coalition members had last year joined other regional parties in establishing the Prosperity Party, as the TPLF refused to join. The mounting differences between the federal government and TPLF exacerbated in September this year, when the Tigray regional government decided to go with its planned regional elections, which the Ethiopian parliament had previously postponed due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
