UN Slashes Critical Healthcare Aid to Yemen

Date: 23 September 2020 - 21:35

News ID: ۸۳۱۲۰

SANA’A (Dispatches) – The United Nations said Wednesday that critical aid had been cut at 300 health centers across war-ravaged Yemen due to a lack of funding, with lifesaving food handouts also reduced.
Between April and August, more than a third of the UN’s major humanitarian programs in Yemen had been reduced or shut down entirely, the UN said, warning of further drastic cuts "in coming weeks unless additional funding is received”.
Lise Grande, the UN’s humanitarian coordinator for Yemen, said only $1 billion of the $3.2 billion needed had been received.
"It’s an impossible situation,” Grande said, and added "The consequences of under-funding are immediate, enormous and devastating.”
"Nearly every humanitarian worker has had to tell a hungry family or someone who is ill that we can’t help them because we don’t have funding.”
"This is the worst humanitarian crisis in the world, yet we don’t have the resources we need to save the people who are suffering and will die if we don’t help.”
Yemen has been in left in ruins by six years of Saudi-led war and tens of thousands of people -- mainly civilians -- have been killed.
Saudi Arabia and a number of its regional allies launched the devastating war on Yemen in March 2015 in order to bring former president Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi back to power and crush Ansarullah movement.
The UN says over 24 million people -- more than three-quarters of Yemen’s population -- need aid and protection.
Last week, two top UN officials told the Security Council of their fears for the declining situation in Yemen.
They also slammed several Arab donors, including the perpetrator of the devastating war in Yemen, Saudi Arabia, for failing to deliver on their aid pledges.
Mark Lowcock, the UN under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, warned the "specter of famine” had also returned in Yemen.
UN envoy Martin Griffiths said Yemen could "slip back away from the road to peace” and cited "increased fighting, greater humanitarian needs and the Covid-19 pandemic” among the factors in play.