At least 115 children have been killed and 172 maimed in a month of fighting and air strikes in Yemen, the UN children’s agency Unicef says. BBC was there:
About half were killed by coalition bombing, the agency said, and others by mines, gunshots, and shelling. The Saudi-led coalition has continued air strikes on rebel forces, despite announcing the end of its air campaign. Houthi rebels and allied forces have been fighting forces allied to the government for several months.
Saudi Arabia and allied Arab states have been carrying out air strikes since March with the declared aim of restoring exiled President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi. The UN said on Friday that at least 551 civilians had been killed in the conflict – more than half the overall estimated death toll.
“There are hundreds of thousands of children in Yemen who continue to live in the most dangerous circumstances,” Julien Harneis, Unicef’s Yemen representative, said. “The number of child casualties shows clearly how devastating this conflict continues to be for the country’s children,” he added. A Unicef spokesman in Geneva said the agency believed its figure of 115 was a conservative estimate.