Forty-seven children werekilled or maimedin January and February in the war that is devastating Yemen, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said on Saturday. “In the first two months of the year, 47 children were killed or maimed across Yemen“, during an aggravation of violence, said in a press release Philippe Duamelle, representative of the UN agency in the country. And since the beginning of the conflictmore than 10,200 children were killed or injured“, adds the text while emphasizing that the real balance sheet was”probably higher“. Unicef adds that more than 2,500 schools are unusable after having been destroyed, occupied for military needs or used as refuge for the displaced.
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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.
According to a UN report published in November 2021, the war has killed nearly 380,000 people, the vast majority of them due to the indirect consequences of the fighting, such as the lack of drinking water, hunger and disease. 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 reported in January that nearly 2,000 child soldiers recruited by Houthi rebels had been killed between January 2020 and May 2021.