Millions Starving In Forgotten War As Saudi Bombs Tear Yemen Apart
Local Editor
Millions of people in Yemen are starving, including children who will be crippled for life, the UN has warned as new photographs from areas worst hit by the war show teenagers dying of hunger.
Yemen now has one of the highest malnutrition rates in the world, the UN World Food Program [WFP] said yesterday. More than 14 million people are going hungry, half of them starving. At least ten of the country's 21 governorates are close to a famine.
The lack of food in the gulf's poorest state is largely the result of a bombing campaign and blockade by a Saudi Arabian-led coalition.
"Hunger is increasing every day and people have exhausted all their survival strategies. Millions of people cannot survive without external assistance," Muhannad Hadi, head of WFP in the Middle East, said.
"An entire generation could be crippled by hunger," Torben Due, the WFP director in Yemen, said.
The 18-month war has claimed the lives of 10,000 people, a third of them civilians, and left 21 million people reliant on food and medical aid.
The health ministry announced that it had run out of funds last month.
Photographs of an emaciated teenager in the Red Sea city of Hodeida have been widely shared online. Saida Ahmad Baghili, 18, who was admitted to al-Thawra hospital on Saturday, is bedridden and unable to eat. Medical staff said that she was surviving on juice, milk and tea. She is from the small village of Shajn, 50 miles southwest of Hodeida, and developed signs of malnutrition five years ago. Her condition deteriorated sharply after food and medical supplies were cut off to the area.
Before the war, Yemen relied on imports for 90 per cent of its food, medicine and fuel. The majority came through Hodeida, which has been badly damaged by coalition bombing raids. The country is now receiving 30 per cent of what it needs, according to the UN, as shipments are stopped by the Saudi-led alliance.
People living in Hodeida, where a third of children under five are suffering from acute malnutrition, said that they had been forced to eat grass and drink seawater before a trickle of aid managed to get into the area last month. "Before the aid we were surviving on anything edible like green leaves, grass. Now we exist on bread and tea from the handouts," a man who knew Baghili said.
He said that she was one of six emergency cases admitted to al-Thawra hospital this week.
"There is no water so sometimes we drink from the sea if we can't get to a well," he added. "Many of our homes have been bombed so we live out in the open in reed huts."
Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team
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