Yemen port battle fuels fears of famine
THERE ARE fears Yemen could be thrown into outright famine as a battle rages for control of the country’s most important port.
The United Arab Emirates, with American backing, has resumed an all-out offensive aimed at capturing Hodeida, where Shi’ite rebels are digging in to fight. Thousands of civilians are caught in the middle, trapped by minefields and barrages of mortars and air strikes.
If the array of Yemeni militias backed by the UAE take the city, it would be their biggest victory against the rebels, known as Houthis, after a long stalemate in the three-year-old civil war.
But the battle on the Red Sea coast also threatens to throw Yemen into outright famine.
Hodeida’s port, the entry point for 70 per cent of food imports and international aid, keeps millions of starving Yemenis alive.
More than eight million of Yemen’s nearly 29 million people have no food other than what is provided by world relief agencies, a figure that continues to rapidly rise. A protracted siege could cut off that lifeline.
The battle has already killed hundreds of civilians and forced hundreds of thousands to flee their homes, adding to the more than two million Yemenis displaced by the war.
Amid the fighting, cholera cases in the area jumped from 497 in June to 1,347 in August, Save the Children said. The assault first began in June, then paused in August as the UN envoy for Yemen tried to cobble together peace talks, the first in two years.
That attempt fell apart and the offensive resumed in mid-September.