The United Nations said on Wednesday (February 9) that 12 million people in Yemen faced the threat of famine brought on by two years of civil war and the situation was rapidly deteriorating.
It appealed for 2.1 billion dollars to provide food and other life-saving aid, saying that Yemen’s economy and institutions are collapsing and its infrastructure has been devastated.
Yemenis in the capital Sanaa described their hardships.
“We don’t have hope or a job or anything. Now there are three families living in one room, a bathroom and a kitchen,” said Mohamed Aly Rabie.
U.N. emergency relief coordinator Stephen O’Brien told a news briefing in Geneva that famine “is now a real possibility for 2017”.
Yemen has been divided by nearly two years of civil war that pits the Iran-allied Houthi group against a Western-backed Sunni Arab coalition led by Saudi Arabia that is carrying out air strikes. At least 10,000 people have been killed in the fighting.
Nearly 3.3 million people – including 2.1 million children – are acutely malnourished, U.N. figures show.
They include 460,000 children under age five with the worst form of malnutrition who risk dying of pneumonia or diarrhoea.
About 55 percent of Yemen’s medical facilities do not function and the health ministry has no operational budget, said Jamie McGoldrick, U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Yemen.
In all, nearly 19 million Yemenis – more than two-thirds of the population – need assistance and protection, the United Nations said.
Yemen’s main port at Hodeida is badly damaged and lacks cranes for offloading, leaving 30 ships offshore at any time and delaying deliveries, McGoldrick said.
The Saudi-led coalition imposes strict restrictions on the ports which it controls.
An estimated 63,000 Yemeni children died last year of preventable causes often linked to malnutrition, the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said last week.
(Reuters)
