TEHRAN (FNA)- The United Nations refugee agency says its work in Yemen is near a “potential breaking point” as coronavirus spreads in the war-damaged country, with rising numbers of families dying from hunger and disease.
Around 80 percent of Yemen’s malnourished population relies on humanitarian assistance, making it the world’s biggest humanitarian crisis even before coronavirus.
Last week, the United Nations said its health care system “has in effect collapsed”, with the virus thought to be spreading throughout the country, and appealed for urgent funding.
“We are reaching a potential breaking point in our programmes where if we don’t receive further funding soon, many of our programmes and particularly our cash assistance programmes to internally displaced Yemenis may have to stop,” said Charlie Yaxley, UNHCR spokesman, at a virtual briefing.
What the UN official needs to include in his statements is that Yemen is also fighting against the ugly lunacy of the House of Saud and its allies. The UN official should say how the illegal war has killed tens of thousands of people, too, which has largely been ignored by the international community. The figure does not include those recorded by hospitals and health centers as having died of the virus and disease.
It has normalized the rationale that you can drop bombs, murder civilians, and get away with it. It’s sad when one realizes that this is what the people of Iraq and Syria have also been experiencing. More bombs have been dropped on them than in Yemen. The poorest country in the Arab world is slowly catching up though - with not one word in Western mainstream media on what it is like to also live under the threat of the coronavirus outbreak.
Today equally unnerving is the lack of official protests as well as the deafening silence at the United Nations Security Council. Many people have been killed, millions more made refugees, and yet no anti-Saudi resolution, let alone a word from the UN chief to end the war.
In any case, the bombing and blockading of Yemen at will is not a one-time thing but rather the start of a long course of military presence in Greater Middle East for the US. The US military began building a new naval base off the coast of Yemen the moment it gave the go-ahead to Saudis to start bombing – with a “moral obligation” to protect a deposed puppet regime, force Yemen to cooperate with Israel, upset regional security, invent new wars, hide the extent of assassinations by drones, and hide the ugliness of it all.
As previously, the vast majority of mainstream media outlets and observers, which focus on debates over class and race, and Trump Tweets, pay little attention to this never-ending humanitarian disaster and now the public health crisis.
America’s moral collapse will continue under the Trump presidency. Many will try at the UN, but there will be no end to the war. Quite the contrary, there will be new lies, new deceits, new manipulations to blame others for the mess that the Saudis and allies created.
The rise of Trump has brought with it a larger humanitarian crisis to Yemen amid the outbreak. After all, he does not care about civilians suffering in Yemen. He doesn't like Muslims either, and/or doesn't want the Saudis accountable for the never-ending war crimes and human sufferings in Yemen
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