Saudi-led air strikes and heavy shelling between warring factions shook several cities in Yemen yesterday, residents said, violating a United Nations humanitarian truce which took effect just before midnight.

The UN-brokered pause in the fighting was meant to last a week to allow aid deliveries to the country’s 21 million people who have endured more than three months of bombing and civil war.

A coalition of Arab states has been bombing the Iranian-allied Houthi rebel movement – Yemen’s dominant force – since late March in a bid to restore to power President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who has fled to Riyadh.

That coalition said yesterday that the Yemeni government in exile had not asked it to pause, according to a news flash on Saudi-owned Arabiya TV. Yemeni government officials were not immediately available to comment.

Air raids pounded Houthi and Yemeni army units in the capital Sanaa and in the embattled southern cities of Taiz and Aden, where residents also reported intense artillery exchanges between the fighters and local militiamen.

In Aden, one of the country’s most deprived and war-torn areas, witnesses said Houthi forces fired mortars and Katyusha rockets towards Opposition fighters based in northern areas and around the city’s international airport.

A 15-year old boy was killed in Houthi shelling on a civilian house in the southern city of Dhalea hours after the truce, residents said.

Bombing by the Arab alliance and fighting have killed more than 3,000 people since March 26.

The Houthis, who hail from the Shi’ite Muslim sect, and their army allies say their spread throughout the country is part of a revolution against a corrupt government and hardline Sunni Muslim militants which they say are allied to the opposition forces, and they vowed to keep up the fight despite the truce.