Yemeni loyalists, supported by Gulf air and naval forces, have captured a strategic Red Sea island, the Arab coalition announced Thursday. Greater Hanish island was "cleansed in a well-executed operation conducted by members of the Popular Resistance supported by the joint coalition forces," said a statement on the official Saudi Press Agency. The Popular Resistance is an umbrella of Yemeni fighters who have been battling rebels known as Houthis and are supported by coalition troops, air and naval forces. Greater Hanish is part of an archipelago that commands access to the Bab al-Mandab Strait between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, through which much of the world's maritime traffic passes. It had been held by around 400 renegade troops loyal to former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who stepped down in 2012 before allying with the Houthis, military sources said. The islands, Saudi state television said, were used by the Houthis to store weapons and smuggle them into Hudaida, Yemen's main Red Sea port. Fishermen told Reuters by telephone that the islands had been subjected to weeks of heavy shelling by Arab forces before they were seized. Saudi Arabia's official Ekhbariya television broadcast images from the island of a damaged mosque and soldiers finding arms and ammunition. There were also images of warships and of helicopters hovering over the island. "The operation comes simultaneously with ongoing operations by the Popular Resistance in the [northern] provinces of Hajja and Jawf to liberate them," the coalition said. The rebels seized the Yemeni capital last year before advancing on other parts of the country. Loyalists have since retaken five southern provinces and are trying to recapture the strategic Taiz province which extends to Bab al-Mandab, in an offensive they launched last month. Unknown attackers Wednesday blew up an abandoned Catholic Church in the southern Yemeni port city of Aden days after ISIS militants assassinated the city's governor. The U.N. says more than 5,700 people have been killed, about half of them civilians, since fighting intensified in March. Gulf monarchs Thursday pledged a global conference on the reconstruction of Yemen. Yemen was already the poorest country in the Arab world, but this year's war has created what a U.N. envoy has called a "catastrophic" situation where up to 80 percent of people need humanitarian aid. Leaders from the six Gulf Cooperation Council states, gathered in Riyadh for a two-day summit, talked of "preparing an international conference on the reconstruction of Yemen" after a political solution to the conflict, a statement said. Leaders from the oil- and gas-rich Gulf – Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates – spoke of "a plan to rehabilitate the Yemeni economy to integrate it into the Gulf economy." Their statement comes less than a week before long-awaited U.N.-led peace talks between Yemen's warring sides begin Tuesday in Switzerland. Gulf leaders welcomed next week's talks, but said any settlement must unconditionally be based on April's U.N. Security Council Resolution 2216, which calls for rebels to withdraw from Yemen's key cities and surrender their weapons. "We handed over the names of our negotiating delegation to the U.N.," Abdul-Malik al-Houthi said Thursday in a statement posted on the group's Facebook page. The statement said a draft agenda for talks had been agreed with the U.N. and called for a "serious and responsible dialogue."
