The Yemeni Petroleum Company (YPC) announced on 25 August that the Saudi-led coalition has yet again seized two fuel vessels, and has failed to release a previously seized ship as per the terms of the UN-brokered humanitarian truce agreement.

Among the three vessels are the diesel ship Sundus and the Voss Power ship, according to YPC spokesman Issam al-Mutawakil.

“Instead of adhering to the temporary truce and releasing the diesel ship belonging to the electricity sector, the US-led aggression coalition detained the diesel ship Sundus and the [fuel] ship Voss Power, despite being searched and granted UN permits,” Al-Mutawakil said, adding that the number of ships currently detained by the coalition stands at three.

Since the start of the year, the Saudi-led coalition has been undergoing a campaign of looting Yemen’s natural resources, regularly dispatching tankers to the country’s ports and illegally loading hundreds of millions of dollars-worth in oil onto them for sale.

At the start of this month, it was reported that in the period since the implementation of the truce on 2 April until its most recent extension on 2 August, the Saudi-led coalition has plundered $919.6 million worth of Yemen’s crude oil and natural gas revenues.

As Saudi Arabia and its allies continue to pillage Yemen’s oil, the UN has announced that it is still $16 million short of its $80 million goal to fund an operation that will remove a million oil barrels from the FSO Safer.

The FSO Safer is a decaying, fuel supertanker that has been anchored off of Yemen’s coast for around three decades, holding roughly four times the amount of crude that was spilled during the Exxon Valdez disaster. The tanker has received no maintenance since the start of the war, and has been referred to as a ticking time bomb.

“A spill on the scale projected by the UN would have a devastating impact on Yemen. It would aggravate the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, threaten millions with starvation, and destroy livelihoods. It would also be an unimaginable ecological catastrophe,” Nabil Hayel Saeed Anam, the managing director of HSA Group, said.

HSA Group, Yemen’s largest private company, has donated $1.2 million dollars to fund the operation.

In June, the UN announced that it has resorted to a crowdfunding campaign to cover the cost of the project, as it has been facing its biggest funding gap ever due to the west’s prioritization of relief funds for Ukraine, as well as the several crises unfolding across the world.