SANA’A (Xinhua/AP) – Yemen’s Army said on Monday that they its forces killed at least 95 Saudi-led coalition militants and mercenaries in a battle in the country’s northwestern province of Hajjah in the past two days.

The battle that killed 15 Saudi and 80 Sudanese militants “drove the mercenaries out of the western part of Harad city near the Red Sea,” al-Masirah TV quoted a Yemeni military statement as saying.

Dozens of Saudi and Sudanese militants were captured in the battle, the statement added.

The Saudi-backed militants have been fighting Yemeni army and popular forces for nearly seven years, with Hajjah as one of the critical battlegrounds.

In February, the Yemeni forces drove the militants out of Harad, a city in Hajjah, and have since controlled large areas of the province.

Saudi Arabia and a number of its regional allies — including the United Arab Emirates — launched a brutal war against Yemen in March 2015. The war was meant to eliminate Yemen’s popular Houthi Ansarullah movement and reinstall a former regime. The conflict, accompanied by a tight siege, has failed to reach its goals, but has killed hundreds of thousands of Yemeni people.

The Saudi-led coalition has been preventing fuel shipments from reaching Yemen, while looting the impoverished nation’s resources.

 

‘161,000 to Face Famine’

 

More than a dozen UN agencies and international aid groups said Monday that 161,000 people in war-torn Yemen are likely to experience famine over the second half of 2022 — a fivefold increase from the current figure.

The stark warning came in a report by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or IPC, ahead of an annual fund-raising conference that the United Nations is hosting on Wednesday. The IPC is a global partnership of 15 UN agencies and humanitarian organizations working in Yemen. It tracks and measures food insecurity in conflict-stricken regions.

The report underscores the dire situation in the poorest Arab nation since the Saudi-led aggression. 

“These harrowing figures confirm that we are on a countdown to catastrophe in Yemen and we are almost out of time to avoid it,” said David Beasley, head of the World Food Program, appealing for immediate funding to “avert imminent disaster and save millions.”

The IPC report says 19 million people in Yemen — out of a population of more than 30 million — are likely to unable to meet their minimum food needs between June and December, up from 17.4 million.

Also, 2.2 million children, including 538,000 already severely malnourished, and about 1.3 million women, could be acutely malnourished by the end of the year, the report said.

“More and more children are going to bed hungry in Yemen,” said Catherine Russell, UNICEF’s executive director. “This puts them at increased risk of physical and cognitive impairment, and even death.”