News / Yemen

Saudi blockade drives 500 Yemeni kids into malnutrition weekly, aid group says

Wednesday, 22 November 2017 3:35 PM [ Last Update: Wednesday, 22 November 2017 5:00 PM ]

A malnourished Yemeni child receives treatment at a hospital in the port city of Hudaydah, November 21, 2017. (Photo by AFP)

The International Rescue Committee says Saudi Arabia's ongoing blockade on Yemen drives 500 children into malnutrition every week.

The New York-based relief group said on Wednesday that the siege was responsible for the "humanitarian misery for millions of Yemenis."

On November 6, Saudi Arabia announced that it was shutting down Yemen’s air, sea, and land borders, after Yemeni fighters targeted an international airport near the Saudi capital, Riyadh, with a cruise missile. The United Nations made a plea for the Saudi war machine to remove its blockade, warning that without aid shipments “untold thousands of innocent victims, among them many children, will die” and that a partial lifting was not enough.

"Sanctions and inspections should not be used as weapons of war," the aid group said in a statement.

It also denounced as a “disgrace” the international community’s inaction, saying its silence "is enabling what could be collective punishment."

A displaced Yemeni child walks past makeshift shelters in an empty lot in the Yemeni coastal city of Hudaydah on November 16, 2017. (Photo by AFP)

Saudi Arabia has been incessantly pounding Yemen since March 2015 in an attempt to crush the Houthi Ansarullah movement and reinstate former President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, who is a staunch ally of the Riyadh regime, which has failed to fulfill the objectives of its campaign.

More than 12,000 people have been killed since the onset of the campaign. Much of the Arabian Peninsula country's infrastructure, including hospitals, schools and factories, has been reduced to rubble due to the war.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has said that the Saudi blockade has left five cities in Yemen running out of clean water due to a halt in the import of fuel needed for pumping and sanitation, warning of “a renewed cholera outbreak.”

Some 2,100 people have died of cholera since April as hospitals struggle to secure basic supplies across the country. The epidemic had been on the wane for weeks in Yemen, although new cases are still running at around 2,600 per day.

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