Local Editor
The United Nations children’s fund is expressing serious concern over the plight of Yemeni children amid the ongoing Saudi bombardment.
The UN International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) highlighted the suffering of Yemeni children in its latest report titled ‘Falling through the cracks’, which was released on Monday to mark the second anniversary of the deadly Saudi offensive on the impoverished country.
“As the war in Yemen completes two years, children continue to pay the heaviest price while families’ coping mechanisms are stretched to their limit,” the report read.
The report adds that almost 10 million Yemeni children are currently in need of humanitarian assistance while some 2.2 million of them are acutely malnourished. Half a million children suffer from severe acute malnutrition, up by 200 percent since 2014.
“Malnourished children across Yemen are teetering between life and death…. Cemeteries are filling up with small unmarked graves, the deaths of children unreported to authorities, their suffering invisible to the world,” the UNICEF report said.
It also warned that over 17 million people – 65% of the Yemeni population- are food insecure, meaning that they cannot afford feeding themselves and their children adequately.
Nearly 80 percent of Yemeni families are in debt or are borrowing money just to feed their kids, it added.
“The poorest country in the Middle East, Yemen is now the largest food security emergency in the world,” the report warned, estimating that at least 7.3 million Yemenis need emergency food assistance to survive.
Moreover, UNICEF stressed that education in Yemen has been severely affected by violence with thousands of schools damaged or destroyed in Saudi air raids. It further put the total number of Yemeni children out of school at two million.
Last week, Yemen Red Crescent Society urged the international community to provide more humanitarian aid to the displaced Yemenis as they cannot meet their basic needs.
Saudi Arabia has been leading a destructive military campaign against Yemen since March 2015 to reinstate former president Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi and crush the Houthi movement.
The campaign has seriously damaged the country’s infrastructure. Local Yemeni sources have put the death toll at over 12,000, including many women and children.
Source: News Agencies, Edited by Website Team
