Around 50 Thousand Yemeni Children Died Within A Year

Sana’a, MINA – Years of conflict in Yemen plus an economic blockade have resulted in a death rate of around 50,000 children a year.

Infant mortality has risen to a very alarming proportion due to hunger, lack of medical care and widespread poverty. Thus quoted from TRT World media on Monday, March 16.

Reports of child deaths have emerged since the war in Yemen broke out in 2015, but this issue received almost no international response.

UNICEF data for 2018 said that around 30,000 children under the age of 5 died within a year due to malnutrition.

A spokesman for the Ministry of Health in Sana’a, Saif al Hadri, described the situation of Yemeni children as “a disaster in the shadow of war”, indicating that “around 5.5 million children under the age of five suffer from malnutrition”.

Al Hadri revealed that “one child dies every ten minutes in Yemen” and noted: “80 percent of children in Yemen live in anemia due to malnutrition.”

He added: “Two hundred thousand women of childbearing age or some of them are pregnant or have given birth to children who are malnourished, which threatens the lives of children.”

Support from the international community is not enough, according to al-Hadri. He also added that no leading global power had taken serious initiatives to force the Gulf states of Saudi Arabia to open the Yemen blockade.

Deaths of children in Yemen increase in winter, especially in cold mountainous regions.

Malnutrition, malaria, and diphtheria have proven fatal for tens of thousands of children living in urban areas.

According to UNICEF, Yemen is the biggest humanitarian crisis in the world, with more than 24 million people or around 80 percent of the population, in need of humanitarian assistance, including more than 12 million children. (T/RE1)

Mi’raj News Agency (MINA)