SANAA (Dispatches) – Almost two years into the Saudi war on Yemen, a rights NGO says the military campaign has cost the lives of more than 12,000 civilians.
Yemen’s Legal Center for Rights and Development, an independent monitoring group, in a report released on Thursday put the civilian death toll in war-torn Arab country at 12,041.
The fatalities, it said, comprise 2,568 children and 1,870 women.
The rights body said the bombings have also wounded 20,001 civilians, including 2,354 children and 1,960 women, while more than four million others have been displaced.
In a latest development, two Saudi troops have been killed in attacks carried out by Yemen's army soldiers and allied fighters against targets inside the kingdom, the al-Masirah television network says.
A Saudi officer was killed by sniper fire at the al-Karas military base in the southwestern Jizan region, while rocket fire killed a policeman in Dhahran al-Janub in the Asir region late Wednesday.
Saudi Arabia's civil defense department said the second attack also left a civilian wounded. Department spokesman, Colonel Mohammed Abdulrahim al-Asemi, identified the slain policeman as Mubarak bin Saleh al-Qahtani.
Over the past two years, at least 128 Saudis have been killed in the country's south, some in skirmishes on the Yemeni border and others in retaliatory rocket fire.
 
‘Millions at risk of malnutrition’

The World Health Organization has warned of a deepening health crisis in Yemen, which is under Saudi military aggression, saying lack of funds is putting millions of Yemenis at risk of disease and malnutrition.
Nevio Zagaria, WHO's acting representative in Yemen, said in a statement that nearly 15 million Yemenis lacked access to essential health services.
"With more than 14.8 million people lacking access to basic healthcare, the current lack of funds means the situation will get much worse," media outlets quoted Zagaria as saying.
The WHO official said that about 4.5 million Yemenis, including 2 million children, need assistance in treating or preventing malnutrition, a 150-percent increase since late 2014.
"We urgently need resources to help support the health system as a whole, and are calling on donors to scale up their support before more innocent lives are lost unnecessarily," Zagaria noted
The agency says only 45 percent of Yemen's health facilities are fully functional and accessible.
According to WHO, highly-specialized medical staff have left the country, and the health workers that have remained have not received regular salaries since September.