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Yemen blockade killing civilians: MSF

Yemenis wait in line to buy bread from a bakery in the city of Ta'izz, on April 22, 2015. (AFP Photo)

An international medical organization has voiced concern about the humanitarian situation in Yemen, saying the Saudi blockade of the impoverished state is killing as many civilians as the country’s Saudi-led crisis.

Joanne Liu, the president of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) or Doctors Without Borders, made the remarks in a telephone interview with AFP from Yemen's capital city of Sana’a on Thursday.

Liu said the Saudi-imposed restrictions on the delivery of aid to Yemen is "killing as (many people as) the current conflict,” stressing the need for “ways to get supplies to come in, in a safe way, and people can get their medicine and not die" of easily treatable diseases.

Last week, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) also expressed concern over the plight of civilians in Yemen amid Saudi Arabia's deadly air raids against the war-wracked country.

Vendors try to salvage goods from under the rubble of their shops following an airstrike by Saudi Arabia on the Yemeni capital city of Sana’a, July 20, 2015. (© AFP)

 

On March 26, Saudi Arabia began its military aggression against Yemen – without a UN mandate – in a bid to undermine the Houthi Ansarullah movement and to restore power to the fugitive former president, Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi, who is a close ally of Riyadh. The Al Saud regime also imposed an aerial and naval blockade on neighboring Yemen.

The country is also the scene of clashes between the Yemeni army and popular committees, loyal to Houthi fighters, on the one side and Saudi-backed militants on the other.

On Thursday, Saudi warplanes carried out fresh airstrikes on several regions in Yemen’s central province of Ma’rib. Saudi jets further conducted air raids on Yemen’s southwestern province of Lahij and the district of Harad in the country’s northwestern province of Hajjah. Razih District in Yemen’s northwestern province of Sa’ada also came under Saudi shelling fire.

Meanwhile, fighter from Yemen’s Houthi Ansarullah movement and allied army forces targeted Saudi military bases in southwestern border city of Najran in retaliation for the Riyadh regime’s ongoing military campaign. They also launched retaliatory rocket attacks on a Saudi military base in the southwestern city of Jizan. 

Tarik Jasarevic, a spokesman for the World Health Organization, said recently that 1,859 civilians were among the total of 3,984 people killed in Yemen until July 19. Local Yemeni sources, however, put the fatality figure at much higher.


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