UN: Yemen’s Hodeida ‘one airstrike away from unstoppable epidemic’
The United Nations warned that the Hodeida port in Yemen is just one airstrike away from an epidemic that will be impossible to stop. The United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator in Yemen Lise Grande said that the incessant airstrikes on the port are putting hundreds of thousands of Yemenis at extreme risk, eurasiantimes.com reported.
An alliance led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates launched an offensive on the heavily defended Red Sea port on June 12 in the largest battle of the three-year war, which the United Nations had feared risks triggering a famine.
These attacks ignored repeated warnings that the port being under attack will trigger a food and humanitarian crisis in an impoverished Yemen.
Cholera has already spread in part of Yemen and a shortage of food, sanitation and water will only trigger an epidemic which will be hard to stop.
Recent airstrikes near the port damaged a health care center and a sanitation facility making things worse. A water station responsible for providing water to most parts of the city was also damaged.
The Saudi-led alliance intervened in Yemen in 2015 to restore former president, Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi, a staunch ally of Riyadh and undermine the Houthi Ansarullah movement.
Humanitarian organizations warned last week that Yemen is close to famine after a 25-percent increase in levels of severe hunger this year and the offensive on the main port city of Hodeida, a lifeline for millions.
Thousands more people have been displaced by the conflict and many are having to skip meals and beg on the streets, they said, with an estimated 8.4 million people already on the verge of starvation.
“We perceive the country to be sitting on a knife edge in terms of famine – it could tip at any time really,” Suze van Meegen, spokeswoman for the Norwegian Refugee Council, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone from the capital, Sana’a.