{"id":11870,"date":"2017-11-24T09:37:56","date_gmt":"2017-11-24T09:37:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/?p=11870"},"modified":"2017-11-24T09:37:56","modified_gmt":"2017-11-24T09:37:56","slug":"saudi-blockade-of-yemen-still-in-place-amounts-to-collective-punishment-aid-agency","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/saudi-blockade-of-yemen-still-in-place-amounts-to-collective-punishment-aid-agency\/","title":{"rendered":"Saudi blockade of Yemen still in place, amounts to collective punishment: Aid agency"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\u00a0A major aid agency says Saudi Arabia\u2019s crippling blockade of Yemen is an \u201cillegal collective punishment\u201d of the Yemeni nation, some seven million of whom are on the brink of an appalling famine.<\/p>\n

Jan Egeland, a former UN aid chief who now heads the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), made the remarks on Thursday, a day after the Saudi-led military coalition announced that it would partially lift the siege on the impoverished nation and would let humanitarian supplies in.<\/p>\n

Egeland, whose charity group has already helped one million Yemenis, welcomed an announcement by the coalition on removing the blockade of Yemen\u2019s western port city of Hudaydah and the international airport of the capital city of Sana\u2019a, but said, \u201cWe only have it in writing now and haven\u2019t seen it happen.\u201d<\/p>\n

This came more than two weeks after Saudi Arabia announced that it was shutting down Yemen\u2019s air, sea, and land borders, after Yemeni Houthi Ansarullah fighters targeted an international airport near the Saudi capital, Riyadh, with a cruise missile in retaliation for ceaseless bombardment of Yemen by the Saudi war machine over the past two and a half years.<\/p>\n

The Saudi military, however, announced that it had intercepted the missile, which apparently reached the deepest parts within the Saudi territory.<\/p>\n

\n
<\/a><\/p>\n
PressTV-Yemen cancels all flights under Saudi blockade<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Saudi Arabia forces Yemen to cancel all flights to and from the war-torn country.<\/a><\/div>\n

\u201cSending a missile in the direction of Riyadh is really very bad. But those who are suffering from the blockade had nothing to do with this missile,\u201d Egeland said. \u201cEven if both the flights and humanitarian shipments will go through now, it is not solving the underlying crisis that a country that needs 90 percent of its goods imported is not getting in commercial food or fuel.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Jens Laerke, spokesman of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Assistance, also said in a statement that the Saudi siege was still in place despite Riyadh\u2019s promise to lift it, saying \u201cWe have not yet had any movement as of now.\u201d<\/p>\n

He further announced that UN officials had already submitted requests to the military coalition for deliveries via Hudaydah and Sana\u2019a, saying the \u201chope and expectation\u201d was that vital aid pipelines would reopen on Friday.<\/p>\n

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) also said in a separate statement on Thursday that it was vital to have commercial traffic resumed.<\/p>\n

\u201cYemenis will need more than aid in order to survive the crisis and ward off famine,\u201d ICRC spokeswoman Iolanda Jaquemet said.<\/p>\n

\n
<\/a><\/p>\n
PressTV-‘500 Yemeni kids driven into malnutrition weekly’<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

The International Rescue Committee said the siege is responsible for the “humanitarian misery for millions of Yemenis.”<\/a><\/div>\n

The Saudi-led military coalition has been ceaselessly pounding Yemen since March 2015 in an attempt to crush the popular Houthi Ansarullah movement and reinstate the former president, Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, a staunch ally of the regime in Riyadh.<\/p>\n

According to the latest figures, the war has so far killed over 12,000 Yemenis and wounded thousands more. The Saudi aggression has also taken a heavy toll on the country’s facilities and infrastructure, destroying many hospitals, schools, and factories.<\/p>\n

Riyadh imposed a tight blockade on nearly all Yemeni air, land and sea ports on November 6, prompting human rights and charity groups to raise the alarm over\u00a0deteriorating situation in the country\u00a0as people, particularly children, are increasingly suffering from the lack of food and medical supplies.<\/p>\n

Earlier this month, three of the UN agencies, the World Food Programme, UNICEF and the World Health Organization, in a statement made a fresh plea for the Saudi war machine to remove its blockade on the impoverished nation, warning that without aid shipments \u201cuntold thousands of innocent victims, among them many children, will die.\u201d<\/p>\n

They further warned that even if the blockade was only partially removed, an additional 3.2 million people would be pushed into hunger. The trio also said that one million children were at risk of a fast-growing diphtheria outbreak.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0A major aid agency says Saudi Arabia\u2019s crippling blockade of Yemen is an \u201cillegal collective punishment\u201d of the Yemeni nation, some seven million of whom are on the brink of an appalling famine. Jan Egeland, a former UN aid chief who now heads the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), made the remarks on Thursday, a day …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":11871,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11870","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","","category-islamic-research"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11870","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11870"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11870\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11872,"href":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11870\/revisions\/11872"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11871"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11870"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11870"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11870"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}