UNICEF: Yemen’s Children Need Help

Yemen, one of the world’s current major humanitarian crises, is witnessing its fourth year of a Saudi-led war, which has led to a nation-wide economic recession, deterioration of public services, food and medicine shortages, public budget collapse, high inflation, deepening poverty, and exacerbating the malnutrition crisis.

In an official statement, UNICEF said that it had resumed the third cycle of cash assistance across Yemen. “Nearly 1.5 million of the poorest families in Yemen – an estimated 9 million people – will benefit from emergency cash transfers with generous funding from the World Bank,” the UN organization explained, Middle East Monitor reported.

“Nearly every child in the country (Yemen) requires assistance amid a serious threat of famine and reoccurring outbreaks of diseases including diphtheria, cholera and acute watery diarrhea," UNICEF stressed.

Yemen’s “intense conflict,” the humanitarian organization noted, has led to the killing and the injury of over 6,000 children in the past three and a half years. “The conflict has almost entirely paralyzed vital infrastructures like water, sanitation and health.”

According to the UNICEF statement, most families in Yemen have depleted their financial resources, and child labor is increasing, and over two million Yemeni children are out of school.

Yemen’s defenseless people have been under massive attacks by the coalition for more than three years but Riyadh has reached none of its objectives in Yemen so far.

Since March 2015, Saudi Arabia and some of its Arab allies have been carrying out deadly airstrikes against the Houthi Ansarullah movement in an attempt to restore power to fugitive former president Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi, a close ally of Riyadh.

The Yemeni Ministry of Human Rights announced in a statement on March 25 that the war had left 600,000 civilians dead and injured until then. The war and the accompanying blockade have also caused famine across Yemen.