WFP: Yemen Sliding to Edge of Abyss

Date: 15 April 2022 - 22:30

News ID: ۱۰۱۶۲۰

SANA’A (Dispatches) – The United Nations World Food Program (WFP) has warned that Yemen is sliding to the brink of famine due to the Saudi-led war and lack of funding for the 2022 humanitarian response plan.
The UN body said on Twitter that as many as 19 million Yemenis will not have enough food to eat.
“In Yemen, food assistance has kept famine at bay, but dwindling funds threaten to push millions of families over the edge. The world must act now before we reach the point of no return,” it added.
The International Organization for Migration (IOM) warned of a decline in funding for humanitarian response plans in Yemen, calling on donors to provide more support.
“Funding for the humanitarian response in Yemen has been on a worrying decline,” the IOM said in a brief statement on Twitter, calling not to forget the people of Yemen.
On 16 March, the United Nations announced that it had received financial pledges from 36 donors worth $1.3 billion for its 2022 humanitarian plan in Yemen, it was seeking to obtain $4.27 billion, to reach 17.3 million people in the war torn country.
Saudi Arabia launched the devastating war against Yemen in March 2015 in collaboration with a number of its allies and with arms and logistics support from the U.S. and several Western states.
The war has stopped well short of all of its goals, despite killing hundreds of thousands of Yemenis and turning the entire country into the scene of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
TO make the situation worse, the Saudi-led coalition has impounded another oil tanker carrying thousands of tons of fuel toward the war-ravaged country in violation of a two-month ceasefire brokered by the United Nations, according to the Yemen Petroleum Company (YPC).
Essam al-Mutawakel, a spokesman for the YPC, said on Thursday that the coalition prevented the ship “Harvest” from entering the strategic Yemeni port city of Hudaydah amid a crippling fuel shortage in the country.
The Yemeni official added that the ship, carrying 29,976 tons of diesel fuel at the time, was seized despite having been inspected and cleared for a port call by the United Nations.
This is not the first time that the Saudi-led coalition has seized Yemeni-bound fuel ships in spite of the truce, which went into effect a fortnight ago at the beginning of the holy Muslim fasting month of Ramadan.
The kingdom has maintained a blockade on Yemen, where the population is in dire need of basic supplies such as food and medicine. Riyadh imposed the blockade in 2015, the same year that it began to lead a war on its southern neighbor.