Alwaght- The World Food Program says Saudi Arabia's continued blockade threatens the lives of 17 million Yemenis as the needy fail to get aid deliveries.
Stephen Anderson, the head of the World Food Program, on Monday described as "heartbreaking" the fact that millions in Yemen depend on sustained access to humanitarian assistance.
Of a population of 26 million, some 17 million Yemenis do not know where their next meal is coming from and seven million are totally dependent on food aid.
On November 6, Saudi Arabia announced that it was shutting down Yemen’s air, sea, and land borders, after Yemeni fighters targeted an international airport near the Saudi capital with a cruise missile.
The United Nations made a plea for the Saudi war machine to remove its blockade, warning that without aid shipments “untold thousands of innocent victims, among them many children, will die” and that its partial lifting was not enough.
Anderson said from Sana’a that humanitarian flights to the northern Houthi-held part of Yemen have been grounded amid the siege.
Last week, the heads of three UN agencies issued a fresh plea for the Saudi-led military coalition to lift its inhuman blockade on Yemen.
Without aid shipments, “untold thousands of innocent victims, among them many children, will die,” the heads of the World Food Program, UNICEF and the World Health Organization said.
Since March 2015, Yemen has been under a brutal aggression by Saudi-led coalition. Over 13,000 Yemenis, mostly civilians including women and children thousands have been killed and thousands more injured in Saudi-led bombardments.
The Saudi-led coalition, backed by the US, has been also imposing a blockade on the impoverished country’s ports and airports as a part of its aggression which is aimed at ousting the popular Ansarullah movement and restoring to power fugitive former president Abdurabbuh Mansour Hadi.
However, Yemeni forces and their local allies including Ansarullah fighters have heroically confronting the Saudi-led aggression by all means.
