From the news desk

Aid groups struggle in Yemen

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The humanitarian situation in Yemen is continuing to cause grave alarm, with aid groups warning about the threat of malnutrition and dire shortfalls in life-saving medicines.

Days after the Saudi-led coalition said that it’s purely militaristic phase of operations had ended and a new phase, ‘Operation Restore Hope’, aimed at prioritising humanitarian assistance had begun, swaths of the country remained inaccessible to aid groups.

Street battles are impeding access in several cities across the south – including Taiz and Aden – where Houthi militias and forces loyal to former President Ali Abdullah Saleh have refused to lay down their arms. Saudi-led airstrikes have continued throughout the week. The Riyadh-led strikes pounded at least 20 targets across Yemen on Thursday and 10 more on Friday.

During the initial phases of the conflict, aid agencies said that they were being denied access to the country and were unable to deliver life-saving aid.

It took almost two weeks to get the first supplies in as fears of an all-out humanitarian catastrophe grew.

Since last week, however, the situation has begun to improve as aid agencies managed to negotiate access.

The World Health Organisation now says it is managing to not only deliver but also stockpile supplies.

“We have the supplies we need inside the country already as we shipped 17 tons last week,” Rana Sidani, a communicaiton officer for the World Health Organisation told MEE in an email.

“We also have supplies prepositioned in Djibouti and can be shipped whenever needed.”

But foreign aid delivery is only a small part of a much larger puzzle. The problem of supplies has not gone away but has instead been kicked down the road.

“Getting aid in through boats and planes has become easier [since the end of Operation Decisive Storm],” said Sara al-Zawqari, a journalist and presenter at Radio Yemen Times, who is currently in London but has been monitoring the situation on the ground closely.

“The Saudis have given licences much quicker so it is much more efficient – even if they do still have to go through security.”

“But while getting aid in is no longer as big a problem, the real issue remains what is happening when the aid is in the country,” she told MEE.

After months of fighting, many of Yemen’s roads have been bombed or damaged and parts of the country’s already fragile infrastructure devastated. Water treatment plants have been damaged or abandoned, and the high and rising price of fuel – which has more than doubled in a month – has made it difficult to move power generators or supplies across the country.

Mazin Salloom, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies’ country representative in Yemen, says that parts of Sanaa are only getting an hour or two of electricity a day, although he admits that this is an improvement on recent weeks, which have seen parts of the capital go without power for days on end.

“For me, it is not a ceasefire. It is a change in the goals and the strategy,” said Salloom.

“In the areas where there is still fighting, so Aden and Taiz for instance, it has been difficulty to get our teams in and to move in and help the victims and the internally displaces. So when there are ongoing operations we are still struggling to gain access.”

“I could not sleep [on Thursday] night. There was the sound of anti-aircraft fire and there was a bombing not far from [Sanaa’s] city centre. Even in the day we hear bombing but it is not in the same level.”
According to the UN, more than 1,000 people – including at least 550 civilians – have been killed since late Mach when the Saudi-led coalition began its almost month-long campaign to roll back Houthi militias and Saleh supporters. However, UNICEF’s spokesperson Christophe Boulierac who said that at least 115 children were among the dead, warned that the death toll was “conservative” and could rise further still.

The UN estimates that some 120,000 people have been displaced by the latest fighting, which comes on top of the 100,000 people who were already internally displaced from previous conflicts. And while not all of them are in urgent need of assistance, many others have fled to towns and villages where it can be difficult to assess their needs.

Fears are now growing for those who have escaped the worst of the fighting, but might soon find themselves facing widespread shortages of food, medicines and water which threaten to get worse as long as the fighting continues.

“People are still holed up and they are suffering. They don’t have water, they are running out of food and they don’t have electricity,” said Zawqari.

UNICEF’s Yemen representative Julien Harneis said in a statement that in addition to the hundreds of children who have been injured there are “hundreds of thousands of children in Yemen who continue to live in the most dangerous circumstances, many waking up scared in the middle of the night to the sounds of bombing and gunfire”. MEE


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