Forty-seven children were “killed or mutilated” during the months of January and February in the war between the Houthi rebels and the government which has devastated Yemen since 2014, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said on Saturday.
Since the beginning of the conflict “more than 10,200 children were killed or injured”adds in a press release Philippe Duamelle, representative of the UN agency in the country, while stressing that the real results are “probably higher”.
According to Unicef, more than 2,500 schools are unusable after having been destroyed, occupied for military purposes or used as refuge for the displaced.
The war in Yemen since 2014 pits the Houthis, supported by Iran, against government forces, supported since 2015 by a military coalition led by Saudi Arabia and in which the United Arab Emirates participate in particular.
This coalition claims that Iran and Hezbollah, a pro-Iranian Lebanese Shiite movement, are training rebel fighters and supplying them with military equipment. Iran denies any support other than political.
80% of the population depends on food aid
According to a UN report published in November 2021, the war has claimed nearly 380,000 lives, the vast majority of them due to the indirect consequences of the fighting, such as lack of drinking water, hunger and disease.
The organization had already recalled that the level of development of Yemen, the poorest country in the Arabian Peninsula, had declined by two decades due to the conflict. Some 80% of the nearly 30 million inhabitants depend on humanitarian aid.
The UN Security Council announced in January that nearly 2,000 child soldiers recruited by the Houthi rebels had been killed between January 2020 and May 2021.
