UN: Over 11,000 children have reportedly been killed or injured in Yemen’s civil war since it began to worsen nearly eight years ago, according to the UN. Thousands of children have died, according to Catherine Russell, executive director of UNICEF, and hundreds of thousands more are still in danger of dying from famine or avoidable diseases.
According to the UN organisation, there are 2.2 million critically malnourished children in Yemen, with one-fourth of them under the age of five. The majority of these children are at high risk of contracting diseases like cholera, measles, and other infectious diseases that can be prevented through vaccination.
Yemen’s war began in 2014, and when Iranian-backed Huthi rebels quickly took control of the capital of Sanaa, Saudi-led forces intervened to support the government in 2015. Since then, hundreds of thousands of people have perished either directly from warfare or indirectly via unclean water, disease epidemics, famine, and other effects.