The lives of some seven million people are at risk in war-ravaged Yemen due to famine, an aid group warned on Wednesday.
Jan Egeland, the Head of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) in Cairo stated this after a tour of the impoverished Arab country.
He said “the world is letting some seven million men, women and children to be slowly engulfed by unprecedented famine.”
He added that 60 per cent of Yemen’s 27 million people were food insecure “and this makes Yemen the world’s largest food security crisis zone.”
Yemen is locked in conflict with regional and religious dimensions, pitting the Saudi-backed government against Iran-allied rebels who seized the capital Sana’a and surrounding areas in late 2014.
The war intensified since March 2015 when Saudi Arabia and fellow Sunni Muslim countries begun air campaign against the mostly Shiite rebels.
Saudi Arabia fears that the rebels will give its regional rival Shiite Iran a foothold on the Arabian Peninsula.
However, Yemen suffered from poverty, the lack of development and environmental problems even before the conflict escalated.