The U.N. has announced a humanitarian truce in Yemen for the next week:

The United Nations has announced that a humanitarian truce will go into force in Yemen to allow urgently needed aid to reach civilians facing the threat of famine in the war-torn country.

The pause in fighting will go into effect at 23.59 local time (2059 GMT) on Friday and last until the end of Ramadan on 17 July.

This is welcome news, and the U.N. envoy deserves credit for getting the belligerents to commit to even this much of a pause in the fighting. Unfortunately, like the last truce in May, it will not be nearly long enough to address the enormous needs of the civilian population, and it doesn’t fix the main cause of the country’s shortages of necessities, namely the Saudi-led blockade. In order to recover from the blockade’s ruinous effects, Yemen needs commercial imports to resume. As aid groups themselves acknowledge, humanitarian aid by itself cannot make up for the shortfall in basic supplies:

Aid agencies have called for an immediate humanitarian truce and warned that their efforts alone cannot meet Yemen’s vast needs. More than half the population lacks proper food, and commercial imports of fuel, food and medicine are “severely” below pre-crisis levels, the U.N. agency OCHA said on Wednesday.

“Whatever we bring … is clearly not sufficient. What you need for Aden in particular and for the country as a whole is to resume commercial imports into the country. Whatever we do as humanitarian workers is only a fraction of what is actually needed,” Antoine Grand, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Yemen, said on Tuesday.

If the coming week’s truce is no more than a temporary pause in the continued starving of Yemen, it will do very little to alleviate the extraordinary suffering of Yemen’s civilian population. If it could be used as the first step in a longer cease-fire and a revived diplomatic process, then it might lead to some significant and lasting improvement of the country’s internal conditions. If the Saudis resume their campaign after this next week and continue strangling Yemen as they have been doing for the last fifteen weeks, any good that comes from the truce will quickly be erased. This is a chance for the U.S. to pressure the Saudis to halt their campaign and lift their blockade, or at the very least to withdraw U.S. assistance from their war.