They have the least to do with the power struggles and the geopolitical games that have plunged their country into a bloody war, but Yemen’s children are the most vulnerable victims of the conflict, the United Nations Children’s Fund said on Tuesday.

Hundreds of thousands of children in Yemen face life-threatening malnutrition, millions lack access to health care or clean water, and over 800 have been drafted as child soldiers in the year-old war, UNICEF said in a damning report, entitled Children on the Brink.

According to the report, more than 900 children have been killed and more than 1,300 injured in the past year alone.

“It’s become one of the worst places to be a child in the world,” said David Morley, President and CEO of UNICEF Canada. “The conflict in Yemen has gone from bad to worse.”

(click to listen to the full interview with David Morley)

In the past year, an average of six children have been killed or injured per day, said the UNICEF report. UNICEF was able to verify 1,500 grave violations of children’s rights, including the equivalent of one attack on a school every single week and 63 attacks on hospitals since the beginning of the conflict one year ago, Morley said.

Child soldiers

Boys who are part of the Houthi fighters, hold weapons as they ride on the back of a patrol truck during a demonstration to show support to the movement, and rejecting foreign interference in Yemen’s internal affairs, in Sanaa March 13, 2015. © Mohamed Al-Sayaghi / Reuters

“Schools and hospitals should be safe places for children and it’s not just happening,” Morley said. “We’ve also seen the increase of the number of children that are being recruited into the armed groups, sometimes children as young as 10 years old.”

UNICEF has verified 848 cases of such recruitment by all warring parties, Morley said.

“This is a violation of children’s rights and it’s a violation of international humanitarian law,” Morley said. “There could be no more recruitment of children as armed fighters!”

Across Yemen, much-needed basic services have been paralyzed as the inflow of fuel, water and food resources has been severely disrupted by the ongoing conflict.

UNICEF estimates that nearly 10,000 children under five years old may have died in the past year from preventable diseases as a result of the decline in key health services including immunization and the treatment of diarrhoea and pneumonia, among others.

This is in addition to nearly 40,000 children under five who died every year in Yemen before the conflict began.

Ten million children in urgent need

A woman holds her malnourished daughter at a hospital in Yemen’s capital Sanaa July 28, 2015. © Khaled Abdullah Ali Al Mahdi

“The wider conflict means that 10 million children are in urgent need of some kind of support: from water to schooling, to nutrition,” Morley said. “It’s a terrible place to be a child right now.”

One of the poorest countries in the world even before the war began, Yemen has been pushed to the brink by the devastation of the past year, said Morley.

“We’ve seen that 600 hundred health facilities – from neighbourhood clinics to hospitals – have stopped working because they’ve been damages either directly from the war or else it means that there is not enough fuel, not enough electricity or because health centres have been targeted, people are afraid to come to work,” Morley said. “We’ve also seen that children do not go to school in the same way, again it wasn’t very good before, but now it’s almost 400,000 children who stopped going to school because the schools have been closed.”

Water shortage

Girls carry buckets they filled with water from a water pond amid an acute shortage of water supply to houses in the historic city of Thula of Yemen’s northwestern province of Amran August 20, 2015. War-torn Yemen is on the brink of famine, with millions of women and children most at risk of starvation as fighting around major ports stalls imports of food and other humanitarian aid, according to the United Nations. © Mohamed Al-Sayaghi / Reuters

Access to clean water is another health emergency affecting Yemeni children, Morley said.

More than two million children face the threat of diarrhoeal diseases and 320,000 are at risk of severe acute malnutrition.

“That’s part of the reason why we’re putting a lot of our effort into restoring water supplies,” Morley said. “But it’s very hard to keep it going.”

Help from Canada

Canada is one of the largest donors to UNICEF and its emergency response work, Morley said.

“As they planning for this year, we hope we can count on their continued support,” Morley said. “And also that Canada will continue to raise its voice in the diplomatic forums to be able to say that there must be no more violations of international humanitarian law by anybody in Yemen.”

A United Nations panel of experts has called on the UN Security Council to establish an international commission of inquiry to investigate reports of alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by all warring parties in Yemen, including the Western-backed Saudi-led coalition.

In its final report to the UN Security Council obtained by Radio Canada International, a UN panel investigating the implementation of Security Council resolutions related to the conflict in Yemen says it has found “widespread and systematic” violations of international humanitarian law committed both by the Saudi-led coalition and their Iranian-backed opponents on the ground.

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