Local Editor
The United Nations has opened a third pledging conference in hopes of drumming up some $4 billion this year for Yemen, a war-battered country facing the world's worst humanitarian crisis.
Host U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Tuesday lamented "an overwhelming humanitarian catastrophe" where some 24 million people, or four-fifths of Yemen's total population, require aid and protection.
"Twenty million people cannot reliably feed themselves or their families," he said in Geneva, where the meeting is taking place. "Almost 10 million are just one step away from famine."
Earlier in the day, the pledges of donations for humanitarian work in Yemen reached $2.6 billion. That is a 30 percent increase on the amount pledged at a similar donors conference last year.
U.N. officials say they are running out of money in a country also facing a devastated health care system, a lack of jobs, continued fighting and fallout from the world's worst cholera epidemic in 2017.
Saudi Arabia and the UAE are active participants in the conflict. They lead a Western-backed coalition that supports the resigned regime of former Yemeni President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi against Yemen’s popular Houthi movement.
Source: News Agencies, Edited by Website Team
