A new report on he nearly three year long US-backed Saudi invasion of Yemen has left more than 5,000 Yemeni children killed or wounded, with large numbers of the casualties the result of Saudi airstrikes.
Incredibly, the 5,000 child casualties, meaning an average of five children a day over the 1,000-day conflict, is just the tip of the iceberg, as a Saudi naval blockade has kept food and medicine out of large portions of the country.
UNICEF’s figures also estimated some 400,000 children are currently suffering from severe malnutrition from lack of food, 2,000,000 children have no access to school because of displacement and destroyed schools.
Perhaps the scariest figure, however, was that 11 million Yemeni children, which is roughly all of them, are entirely dependent on humanitarian aid for their survival. Given how difficult it is to get that aid in, especially in northern Yemen, all the other figures are just going to keep growing.
I used to read about ‘starvation related deaths’ of children being somewhere between 50,000 to 100,000 but for some reason this accounting has fallen out of fashion.
Cholera and Diphtheria were non-existent prior to the Saudi intervention, when the number of infections reached 800,000 the number of deaths was documented at 2,000 yet this figure never seems to go up as well.
So there you have it, people are always on the verge of starving but not starving, starvation related deaths mysteriously stop, or someone wants to minimize them.