Serious Risks Threaten Hundreds of Thousands Lives of Civilians in Hodeidah
YemenExtra
SH.A.
“Hundreds of thousands of civilians in Hudaydah are still in serious danger after a week of fighting in the city,” UN Resident Coordinator for Yemen Liz Grande said.
“We are very concerned about the situation. Even before the fighting began, conditions in Hodeidah were some of the worst in the country,” said Liz Grande.
In a statement, 25 percent of children in Hodeidah are suffering from acute malnutrition. If nutriional support provided by humanitarian partners is disrupted, it risks the lives of about 100,000 children.
Hodeidah was one of the outbreaks of the cholera epidemic last year, the worst outbreak of cholera in recent history. “The level and degree of human suffering is heart-breaking,” she said.
“Humanitarian workers have been distributing aid on the ground all the time, and we will stay there as long as conditions permit,” she added “we have been emptying food in the port and we are entering as much emergency stocks as possible.”
“We have prepared pre-stocked amounts of fuel to help run water pumps, sewage treatment plants and run hospitals, and we are helping to provide more than 46 million liters of water a day also11 health teams were sent to the health facilities in Hudaydah,” she said, adding that the partners had prepared 10 humanitarian points to distribute food boxes and emergency kits to displaced families.
The humanitarian coordinator said cholera was the top concern among all concerns.
She said it would not take long for a new epidemic outbreak that is difficult to stop. Cholera can spread rapidly if the water system collapses in one neighborhood only if there is nothing that can be done to address the situation immediately.
The United Nations considers the crisis in Yemen as the worst humanitarian crisis in the world and called on all conflict parties to do everything in their power to protect civilians and civilian infrastructure, including the port of Hodeidah, the main gateway to humanitarian aid to the country.
The United Nations and its partners have requested $ 3 billion through the 2018 Humanitarian Response Plan to support 2.22 million people in need of aid, and $ 1.5 billion has so far been received, half of the funding needed for this year.
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