A child who was injured in a deadly 2018 Saudi-led coalition airstrike in a hospital in Saada, Yemen. Photo / Hani Mohammed, AP
A child who was injured in a deadly 2018 Saudi-led coalition airstrike in a hospital in Saada, Yemen. Photo / Hani Mohammed, AP
More than 10,000 children in Yemen have been killed or injured in violence linked to years of war in the impoverished country, a spokesman for Unicef said.
The verified tally from the United Nations' reporting and monitoring operation provides what is surely an undercount of the real toll because manymore child deaths and injuries go unrecorded, Unicef spokesman James Elder told reporters. He said the new numbers amount to four children killed or maimed every day, a "shameful milestone" since a Saudi-led coalition intervened in the war in 2015.
The UN has long considered Yemen — where war resumed in late 2014 after rebels took over the capital, Sanaa — as home to the world's worst humanitarian crisis. The country on the Arabian Peninsula faces the combined troubles of protracted conflict, economic devastation, and crumbling social and health services, as well as underfunded UN assistance programmes.
More than four in five children require humanitarian assistance, which amounts to some 11 million children, Unicef says.
Yemenis carry the body of a girl who was killed in an explosion at a warehouse that killed at least seven children in nearby schools in 2019. Photo / Hani Mohammed, AP, File
According to the UN figures, 3455 children were killed and more than 6600 injured in the fighting in Yemen between March 15, 2015 and September 30 this year.
Aside from the violence, Elder said many Yemenis are starving not because of a lack of food but from a lack of money to buy it.
"They are starving because adults continue to wage a war in which children are the biggest losers," he said, appealing for more funds to help the agency. "Yemen is the most difficult place in the world to be a child. And … it is getting worse."
Overall, the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, or ACLED, has estimated that some 130,000 people have died in the war in Yemen.
