UNITED NATIONS (Dispatches) – Eight million Yemenis will likely lose all humanitarian aid in March unless urgent funds are delivered, United Nations officials have warned, amid an escalation in a long-running Saudi-led war that last month caused the highest toll in civilian casualties in at least three years.
UN special envoy Hans Grundberg and UN humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths told the UN Security Council that January has seen nearly two-thirds of major UN aid programs being scaled back or closed, while combat zones have multiplied.
Grundberg said a Saudi-led coalition air raid on a detention facility in Sa’ada last month “was the worst civilian casualty incident in three years”, as he pointed at an “alarming” increase in air raids in Yemen, including on residential areas in Sana’a and the port area of Hudaydah.
More than 650 civilians were killed or injured in January by Saudi air raids, shelling, small arms fire and other violence, “by far the highest toll in at least three years”, according to UN figures.
The UN has long warned that the war in Yemen has caused the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, but Griffiths cautioned that “aid agencies are quickly running out of money, forcing them to slash life-saving programs”.
For more than six years, the Riyadh-led war on the besieged Arab country, aimed at re-installing the regime of Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi, has spawned the most horrible humanitarian disaster.
The United States, first under Barack Obama and later under Donald Trump and Joe Biden, has been the Saudi-led coalition’s partner in the devastating war that has left hundreds of thousands of Yemenis dead and displaced millions more.
The U.S. and its Western allies, especially the UK, have backed the horrific war in Yemen by supplying lethal arms to Riyadh and its allies, chief among them the UAE, as well as logistical and political support.
Yemen’s Armed Forces have released new footage depicting their retaliatory drone attacks on targets deep inside Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Yemen’s War Media outlet issued the footage on Tuesday, hours after the Armed Forces’ spokesman Yahya Sare’e announced its release.
The exact date of the reprisal counterattacks in the footage is not clear.
The Yemeni forces have recently escalated their missile and drone attacks against the Persian Gulf countries, which are arch-allies in a 2015-present war on the impoverished Arab country.
Meanwhile, at the United Arab Emirates’ behest, the Zionist regime has reportedly been lobbying the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden to designate Yemen’s popular Ansarullah movement as a “terrorist group.”
Trump added Ansarullah to the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations during his final days in office, but his successor, Biden, reversed the decision.
Last year, the U.S. Department of State reversed a last-minute decision by the ex-administration, which put Ansarullah on the U.S. list of “foreign terrorist groups” and subjected them to sanctions.
Following the escalation in Yemen’s counterattacks against the UAE last month, Biden said a re-designation of Ansarullah was “under consideration.”
On Tuesday, a Zionist regime official told The Times of Israel that Abu Dhabi has stepped up its lobbying for the blacklisting of the Yemeni group and enlisted Tel Aviv in the effort.
UN officials said Tuesday that the Saudi-led war in Yemen has witnessed a dangerous escalation, with January’s civilian casualties the highest in at least three years and 8 million Yemenis likely to lose all humanitarian aid next month without urgent new funds.