SANAA

 Yemen's four state-owned television channels, which are now controlled by the Shiite Houthi group, abruptly halted broadcasts on Thursday.

The channels stopped broadcasting after President Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi asked Egypt's NileSat broadcasting services company to take the channels off air, according to Tawfiq al-Sharaabi, the former head of one of the suspended channels.

He added that Hadi had told Egyptian officials that the Houthis had been using the channels for their own ends.

"In recent months, the Egyptian authorities were reluctant to suspend the channels' transmissions," al-Sharaabi told The Anadolu Agency.

"But this attitude appears to have changed, especially after Egypt announced its participation in the Saudi-led military campaign against the Houthis," he added.

Nevertheless, the Houthis still have one functioning TV channel – the Al-Massira channel, which broadcasts from London.

Several Arab states have joined the Saudi-led offensive, which kicked off early Thursday with a string of airstrikes against Houthi positions in Yemen, including some in capital Sanaa.

Predominantly-Sunni Saudi Arabia said the strikes were in response to Hadi's appeals for military intervention in Yemen with a view to "saving the people from the Houthi militias."

Fractious Yemen has been in turmoil since last September, when the Houthis overran capital Sanaa, from which they have sought to extend their influence to other parts of the country as well.

Some Gulf countries accuse Shiite Iran of supporting the Houthi insurgency.