DUBAI (Dispatches) –
Yemen’s seven-year-old war will have claimed 377,000 lives by the end of the year, through both direct and indirect impacts, a UN agency estimates in a report published Tuesday.
Nearly 60 percent of deaths will have been caused by indirect impacts such as lack of safe water, hunger and disease, it said, suggesting that the Saudi-led war will have directly killed over 150,000 people.
Most of those killed by the war’s indirect effects were “young children who are especially vulnerable to under- and malnutrition,” said the UN Development Program report.
“In 2021, a Yemeni child under the age of five dies every nine minutes because of the conflict,” it found.
Saudi Arabia intervened in Yemen in early 2015 to shore up the government which had resigned and fled to Riyadh. The war since then has had “catastrophic effects on the nation’s development”, said the report.
The UNDP has warned in the past that the war on Yemen, already the poorest country in the region, had thrown its development back by over two decades.
The Yemen war is often labeled the greatest humanitarian disaster in the world.
Projecting the impact of continued fighting into the future, the UNDP warned that 1.3 million people in total will have died by 2030.
“A growing proportion of those deaths will occur... due to second-order impacts that the crisis is waging on livelihoods, food prices and the deterioration of basic services such as health and education.”
If the war stopped now, the UNDP said, there would be “hope for a brighter future in Yemen” which it said could achieve middle-income status by 2050.
But it judged that, for now, “the situation continues to propel in a downward spiral”.
Escalating fighting, including tank battles and regular bombardment by fighter jets and drones, have in some areas destroyed even the most basic infrastructure.
In recent weeks fighting has escalated on several fronts, mostly
near the strategic Ma’rib city, the Saudi-backed forces’ last major stronghold in Yemen’s oil-rich north.
UNDP administrator Achim Steiner said that “millions of Yemenis continue to suffer from the conflict, trapped in poverty and with little possibility for jobs and livelihoods”.
More than 80 percent of the population of around 30 million require humanitarian assistance, the report said, while “the economy is close to collapse”.
“Yemen is the world’s worst and largest humanitarian and development disaster, and it is continuing to worsen.
A Saudi airstrike Tuesday gutted a plastics factory in the Yemeni capital of Sanaa, the latest attack in the kingdom’s war campaign in the country.
The dawn strike hit a factory owned by a Syrian national and situated near a hospital in the south of the city, according to a statement.