UN: War, pestilence have pushed country to brink

The health system in Yemen is in a state of collapse after five years of war, disease and starvation, and now coronavirus, the United Nations has said.

A fund-raising conference yesterday was told that the country was billions of dollars short of the regular annual funding intended to ease its long-running humanitarian crisis, even before the virus began to affect the country.

‘‘The situation in Yemen is catastrophic,’’ Mark Lowcock, the UN humanitarian affairs chief, told the virtual conference, hosted by the Saudis and set up to raise funds for the UN’s Yemen appeal. He said that hospitals had shut their doors to new patients across Yemen, but that conditions were also a result of the fighting that has divided the country.

‘‘That is what more than five years of war have done to Yemen,’’ he said. ‘‘The health system is in a state of collapse.’’

The war began in 2014 when a rebel faction known as the Houthis, who are supported by Iran, swept into the capital, Sanaa, forcing the government to flee. Saudi Arabia, under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and the United Arab Emirates intervened on the government’s behalf in March 2015, securing Aden and the south and east of the country, but a separatist organisation later seized control of Aden.

The war, along with a Saudiled blockade and Houthi expropriation of aid supplies, has left millions of Yemenis close to starvation, with no long-term resolution in sight. – The Times