The United Nations Children’s Fund, also known as Unicef, has just released a report from the field in Yemen, the driest country on earth, that millions of people, including children, are at serious risk of hunger. The problem extends to Sudan, Lebanon and Syria.
On August 31 Unicef reports that aid is needed now for 58 million people, including about 30 million children in Yemen, Sudan, Lebanon, and Syria with Yemen at highest levels of risk for starvation.
This is in tandem with a polio outbreak which threatens to become a pandemic.
Last week, Yemen’s al-Masirah television network reported on Yemen’s Ministry of Public Health and Population as confirming that the Saudi-led blockade on Yemen has raised acute malnutrition rates to more than 632,000 children under the age of five and 1.5 million pregnant and lactating women.
“The siege and intense bombardment with prohibited weapons caused a high rate of congenital abnormalities and miscarriages, with an average of 350,000 miscarriages and 12,000 malformations,” it emphasized.
Saudi Arabia, backed by the United States and other allies in the region launched a war against Yemen’s rebels. An ensuing 8 years of war have left hundreds of thousands dead.
The plan was to reinstall the Riyadh-friendly regime of Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi and crush the popular Ansarullah resistance movement, which in place of a functional government has left Yemen in shambles.
Ticking time bomb oil tanker
Yemen is also one of the driest countries in the world. And it is where rebels control access to an oil tanker that could explode at any moment.
A ship was taken over by the Houthi militias in March 2015, when they took control of the coast around the port area of Hodeidah. The Houthi movement officially called Ansar Allah (Ansarullah) and colloquially simply Houthis, is an Islamic political and armed movement that emerged from Sa’dah in northern Yemen in the 1990s. They are supported by the Hezbollah.
They are not allowing international groups to move the tanker.
“The growing risk that the Safer oil tanker could rupture or explode causing an environmental, economic and humanitarian catastrophe for Yemen and its neighbours,” the UN Security Council has admitted.
