Tabnak – With Saudi Arabia showing no merci in its fight against the Yemeni people, the humanitarian situation in the war-torn country is increasingly deteriorating. This, indeed, happens against the backdrop of international condemnations of Riyadh’s bloody campaign in the Arabian Peninsula.
According to a new report, Saudi Arabia has deliberately impaired Yemen’s food supply by systematically targeting the war-torn country’s fishing installations, fishermen, agricultural sites and other food related infrastructure.
The revealing report, named “Strategies of the Coalition in the Yemen War”, has been recently published by the Tufts University affiliated World Peace Foundation after conducting a comprehensive review of data received from several organizations within the country.
The study underlines an extensive Saudi Coalition campaign to combine “economic war” with “physical destruction to create a mass failure in basic livelihoods,” highlighting what it describes as a clear war crime based on the Geneva Conventions and Additional Protocol I.
“If one places the damage to the resources of food producers (farmers, herders, and fishers) alongside the targeting of food processing, storage and transport in urban areas and the wider economic war, there is strong evidence that Coalition strategy has aimed to destroy food production and distribution in the areas under the control of Sana’a,” concludes the report.
Furthermore, the study ultimately challenges the legality of the Coalition’s operations, urging other United Nations Security Council member states to step in and halt the blatant “war crimes”.
“Other forces and institutions will need to call into question the blanket ‘legitimacy’ accorded the Coalition to date by the world’s highest legal body, the UN Security Council.”
Meanwhile, in a recent incident in Yemen, it’s reported that at least 15 Yemenis have been killed in a Saudi airstrike in Hudaydah that has become a flashpoint of a war being waged by Riyadh and its allies against the Arab world's poorest nation.
The fatalities occurred when Saudi planes targeted two buses that were carrying civilians fleeing Hudaydah on Saturday, according to a report by Yemen’s al-Masirah television network.
The attack also injured an unspecified number of others, with the number of fatalities most likely to rise, al-Masirah reported. No further details about the incident have come out as of yet.
Some 15,000 Yemenis have so far been killed and thousands more injured as a result of the bloody campaign launched by Saudi Arabia and its allies, which has also left a record 22.2 million Yemenis in a dire need of food, including 8.4 million threatened by severe hunger, according to UN statistics.
Yemeni Health authorities announced last week that 1 in 3 Yemeni children suffer from severe malnutrition and that 8,000 dialysis patients may face death if the Saudi blockade persists in the war-torn country.
