UN: Yemen war impacts will have killed 377,000 by year’s end

By AFP 23 November 2021, 5:37 pm

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Malnourished girl Rahmah Watheeq receives treatment at a feeding center at Al-Sabeen hospital in Sanaa, Yemen, November 3, 2020. (AP Photo/Hani Mohammed, File)

Yemen’s seven-year-old war will have claimed 377,000 lives by the end of the year, through both direct and indirect impacts, a UN agency estimates in a report.

Nearly 60 percent of deaths will have been caused by indirect impacts such as lack of safe water, hunger and disease, it says, suggesting that fighting will have directly killed over 150,000 people.

Most of those killed by the war’s indirect effects were “young children who are especially vulnerable to under- and malnutrition,” says the UN Development Programme report.

“In 2021, a Yemeni child under the age of five dies every nine minutes because of the conflict,” it finds.