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At least 18,000 Yemeni civilians killed in Saudi-led air strikes since 2015

AT LEAST 18,000 Yemeni civilians have been killed or wounded by Saudi-led air strikes since 2015, according to a United Nations panel of experts.

The panel’s report, published on Wednesday, said that the Yemeni people have been subjected to an average of 10 air strikes a day since the bombing campaign began, making a total of 23,000 in the last six years.

They cited the Yemen Data Project, which gathers information on all air strikes conducted by the Saudi-led coalition.

Its indiscriminate war on Yemen, backed by Western powers including Britain, France and the United States, is aimed at restoring the government of President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, who was forced into exile by the mainly Shi’ite Houthi movement in a popular uprising.

According to the US-based Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (Acled), a non-profit-making conflict-research organisation, the war has claimed more than 144,620 lives in Yemen since 2015.

The country has been pushed to the brink of the world’s worst famine in more than a century, according to the UN, with a recent report suggesting that millions are just a step away from starvation.

Last month, UN children’s agency Unicef said in another report that “one child dies every 10 minutes from preventable causes” in Yemen.

“Today in Yemen, almost 21 million people, including 11.3 million children, need humanitarian assistance to survive, 2.3 million children are acutely malnourished and nearly 400,000 children under five suffering from severe acute malnutrition are at imminent risk of death,” Unicef director Henrietta Forde told a meeting of the UN security council.

Despite the UN warning that continued arms sales are exacerbating the humanitarian crisis in Yemen, Britain continues to ply its deadly trade, even going to court to frustrate attempts to block it.

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