RIYADH: A coalition bombing rebels in Yemen for more than two months will continue until a U.N. resolution calling for a rebel pullback takes effect, Qatar’s foreign minister said Thursday.

Khalid al-Attiyah spoke after chairing a meeting of his counterparts from the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).

“The coalition will not be over without the application of the related Security Council resolutions and especially the Resolution 2216,” Attiyah told reporters.

That resolution, issued in April, calls on the Houthis to relinquish territory they have seized.

It asks all parties, particularly the Houthis, to adhere to measures including the outcome of an earlier “national dialogue” tasked with drawing up a new constitution.

Yemen’s warring factions are to meet for U.N.-sponsored talks in Geneva starting Sunday.

“Our brothers in Yemen assured us” that talks will take place within the framework of the Security Council resolutions, the national dialogue outcomes and a GCC initiative, Attiyah said.

Analysts say the Saudi intervention aimed to prevent the kingdom’s regional rival, Shiite Iran, from gaining a foothold on its southern border.

Saudi Arabia’s air force chief, Lt. Gen. Mohammad bin Ahmed al-Shaalan, died of a heart attack Wednesday, the Defense Ministry announced. In a statement carried by the official Saudi Press Agency, it said his death came “during a working trip outside the kingdom.”

A Saudi-led airstrike this week hit a public bus on a highway in southern Yemen linking the city of Aden with the north, killing at least 20 passengers, witnesses and officials said Thursday.

Another set of airstrikes hit a family traveling in a private car, a farmer driving a pickup truck loaded with potatoes, also near Aden this week, as well as a group of anti-rebel fighters in a southwestern city.

The bus was struck Tuesday on the highway between Aden and the city of Taiz. The bodies of the passengers lay strewn by the roadside in the area of Al-Rabat for a whole day, before they were retrieved and brought to Aden, said a resident in the city, Walid Salami.