UN: One Child Dies Every 10 Minutes in Yemen
The United Nations announces that one child in Yemen dies every ten minutes from preventable causes, including hunger and disease.
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UN: Two million three hundred thousand children are not getting enough food
The United Nations announced that every ten minutes, one child dies in Yemen from preventable causes, including hunger and disease.
The Executive Director of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) Henrietta Fore said during a UN Security Council session that in Yemen, "almost 21 million – including 11.3 million children – need humanitarian assistance to survive."
She added that "some 2.3 million Yemeni children are acutely malnourished, and 400,000 children under age five suffer from severe acute malnutrition."
On Monday, the Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs in Yemen, Martin Griffiths, announced that "nearly 50 front lines have reportedly killed or injured more than 1,200 civilians, as collapsing public services deprive people of clean water, sanitation, education, and health care, and cholera and COVID-19 spread freely under such conditions."
He added that “famine is not just a food problem, it’s a symptom of a much deeper collapse,” he warned. People are starving not because there is no food, but because they cannot afford it."
Griffiths continued that "incomes are disappearing, especially salaries for civil servants, who represent a quarter of the population: the collapsed Yemeni currency is particularly disastrous for a country so heavily dependent on imports."
It is noteworthy that the World Bank warned on August 4th that about 70% of Yemen's 30 million people are at risk of starvation.