“The Saudi border is probably not going to be a very welcoming place for a lot of them [Yemenis]…so there are going to be a lot of people probably stuck inside Yemen in a humanitarian crisis,” Grisgraber said on Thursday. “It’s not as likely that many of them are going to be able to get out of there, and so we need to be paying attention to that right from the beginning.”
Grisgraber added that Yemen was already having a humanitarian crisis with huge numbers of both refugees and internally displaced people amid high poverty level.
“On top of that airstrikes [and] military intervention are pretty much always guaranteed to have humanitarian ramifications…I have to assume that that will continue if military intervention continues,” she said.
The Houthi militants began taking control of large areas in Yemen, which forced President Hadi and his government to resign in late January 2015. Hadi was under house arrest in the capital Sanaa before he fled to the port city of Aden in February, disavowing his resignation, and is reportedly hiding abroad at present.