NEW YORK (Dispatches) –
Seventy-five percent of Yemeni children suffer from acute malnutrition, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said Monday.
In a Twitter post, the UN body added that 16.2 million – more than half of the country’s population of 30 million – are food insecure.
Last month, the UN Security Council expressed “grave concern for the dire humanitarian situation [in Yemen], including prolonged starvation and the growing risk of large-scale famine, which is compounded by the dire economic situation.”
Saudi Arabia and some of its regional allies, backed by the U.S. and other Western powers, have been engaged in their devastating war on Yemen since March 2015 to reinstall Yemen’s former President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, a staunch ally of Riyadh, and eliminate the popular Ansarullah movement.
The war, which Riyadh had claimed would last only a few weeks, has failed to achieve its goals, but pushed Yemen to the brink of starvation and famine, killed tens of thousands of innocent people, and destroyed the impoverished state’s infrastructure.
The United Nations has described the war on Yemen as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
Yemen’s National Salvation Government says the Saudi-led coalition that has been waging a war on the impoverished country and al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorist groups work as “partners” in the crimes that are committed against the Yemeni people.
The head of the Committee for Prisoners’ Affairs of the National Salvation Government made the remarks on Sunday, citing Saudi-led militants’ recent execution of as many as 10 prisoners belonging to Yemen’s army and Popular Committees in the western Yemeni port city of al-Hudaydah.
The militants executed the victims on Saturday and dismembered their bodies, Abdul-Qadir al-Morteza said, according to Yemen’s al-Masirah television network. Five of the prisoners belonged to the al-Hudaydah Province, while the rest were respectively from the Hajjah and al-Mahvit Provinces that neighbor al-Hudaydah to the north.
“The crime came just one day after the ringleader of Al-Qaeda in Yemen asserted that the terrorists were partners in the Saudi coalition’s invasion on several fronts in Yemen,” he said. “This crime [therefore] serves to verify his remarks,” noted the official.
Meanwhile, Saudi warplanes launched an airstrike on Yemen’s western coastal province of Hudaydah on Sunday, killing and injuring ten civilians, in yet another violation of the 2018 Stockholm Agreement between the warring sides in Yemen.
The airstrike hit an area to the east of Hays City in Hudaydah overnight on Sunday.
Yemeni media outlets cited local sources as saying that the air raid killed three people and injured seven others.
The airstrike apparently aimed to support the Saudi militants amid reports of fierce clashes between Yemeni army and allied fighters from popular committees, and Saudi-backed militants in Hays district.