Report says Yemen war will have killed 377,000 by year’s end

Yemen’s seven-year-old war will have claimed 377,000 lives by the end of the year, through both direct and indirect impacts, a UN agency estimates in a report published Tuesday.

Nearly 60 percent of deaths will have been caused by indirect impacts such as lack of safe water, hunger and disease, it said, suggesting that fighting will have directly killed over 150,000 people.

Most of those killed by the war’s indirect effects were “young children who are especially vulnerable to under- and malnutrition,” said the UN Development Programme report.

“In 2021, a Yemeni child under the age of five dies every nine minutes because of the conflict,” it found.

A Saudi-led coalition intervened in Yemen in early 2015 to shore up the government after Iran-backed Houthi fighters seized the capital Sanaa months before.

Fighting since then has had “catastrophic effects on the nation’s development”, said the report.

The UNDP has warned in the past that the war in Yemen, already the poorest country in the region, had thrown its development back by over two decades.

The Yemen war is often labelled the greatest humanitarian disaster in the world.

Projecting the impact of continued fighting into the future, the UNDP warned that 1.3 million people in total may died by 2030.

“A growing proportion of those deaths will occur… due to second-order impacts that the crisis is waging on livelihoods, food prices and the deterioration of basic services such as health and education.”