A Yemeni commission has estimated that nearly 450 civilians have died in Yemen since the beginning of the year as a result of the long-running conflict between the Yemeni government and the Huthi insurgency, and despite a precarious ceasefire held between April and October.
The data were provided by Yemen’s National Commission for the Investigation of Alleged Human Rights Violations (NCIAVHR), a «national mechanism» under UN resolutions, as described on its website.
In its balance of the year, published last Thursday and picked up by the news portal The New Arab, the commission has documented the deaths of 447 civilians, among them 35 women and 82 children, especially in the provinces of Taiz, whose capital has been under insurgent siege for years; Hodeida, which houses one of the main ports of the country and Marib, scene of bloody clashes until the declaration of the cease-fire.
Among the crimes reported by the commission are murder, torture, forced displacement, extrajudicial execution, rape and sexual abuse, and destruction of property.
The commission, which recounts a total of approximately 3,400 violent incidents, denounces both the insurgents and the Yemeni Army and its allies, the Saudi-led international coalition, for all these crimes, «with the exception of the laying of mines, the forced recruitment of children and the bombing of homes, for which the Iranian-backed Huthi group is solely responsible.»
The commission calls on all parties to the conflict to comply with international humanitarian law in the protection of civilians in all regions of Yemen, as well as an end to arbitrary arrests, enforced disappearances, torture and looting of property, and urges the international community to take a firm stance against human rights violators.
The United Nations estimates that some 370,000 people have died in Yemen’s civil war that began with the insurgent conquest of the capital, Sana’a, in December 2014, the trigger for a conflict that has ultimately dragged the country, already one of the poorest in the world, into what NGOs and the United Nations consider the worst humanitarian crisis on the planet.
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
