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Yemen’s cholera epidemic likely to intensify in coming months: WHO

FILE PHOTO: A nurse walks by women being treated at a cholera treatment center in the Red Sea port city of Hodeidah, Yemen October 8, 2017. REUTERS/Abduljabbar Zeyad

RIYADH (Reuters) – The World Health Organization warned on Monday that a cholera epidemic in Yemen that killed more than 2,000 people could flare up again in the rainy season.

WHO Deputy Director General for Emergency Preparedness and Response Peter Salama said the number of cholera infections had been in decline in Yemen over the past 20 weeks after it hit the 1 million mark of suspected cases.

“However, the real problem is we’re entering another phase of rainy seasons,” Salama told Reuters on the sidelines of an international aid conference in Riyadh.

“Usually cholera cases increase corresponding to those rainy seasons. So we expect one surge in April, and another potential surge in August.”

A proxy war between Iran-aligned Houthis and the internationally recognized government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, which is backed by a Saudi-led alliance, has killed more than 10,000 people since 2015, displaced more than 2 million and destroyed much of the country’s infrastructure, including the health system.

Yemen relies heavily on food imports and is on the brink of famine. The United Nations says more than 22 million of Yemen’s 25 million population need humanitarian assistance, including 11.3 million who are in acute need.

Salama said the country had also had an outbreak of diphtheria, a vaccine-preventable disease that usually affects children and which has largely been eliminated in developed countries.

Both cholera and diphtheria outbreaks are a product of the damage to the health system in the country, he said, adding that less than half of Yemen’s health facilities are fully functioning.

“We’re very concerned we’re going to go from a failing health system to a failed one that’s going to spawn more infectious diseases and more suffering,” Salama said.

However, Salama said that despite more than 2,000 deaths from cholera, the fatality rate has been low, at around 0.2 to 0.3 percent.

The WHO has approval from the government for vaccination campaigns and is working on ensuring all parties to the conflict implement the plan, he added.

(Reporting by Sarah Dadouch; Editing by Alison Williams)

Displaced by war, some Yemenis sift through garbage for food

Ayoub Mohammed Ruzaiq, 11, stands in a garbage dump where he collects recyclables and food near the Red Sea port city of Hodeidah, Yemen, January 13, 2018.

HODEIDAH, Yemen (Reuters) – After persistent Saudi-led air strikes on their home area in northwest Yemen, the Ruzaiq family packed their belongings and fled to the relative safety of Hodeidah port on the Red Sea.

But with no money or relatives to shelter them, the 18-member family joined a growing number of displaced Yemenis living on or next to the garbage dump of the Houthi-controlled city.

Despite the health risks, the dump has become a source of food for hundreds of impoverished Yemenis and given some young men a chance to try to earn some income.

People collect recyclables and food at a garbage dump near the Red Sea port city of Hodeidah, Yemen, January 14, 2018. REUTERS/Abduljabbar Zeyad

“We eat and drink the food that is thrown away,” said 11-year-old Ayoub Mohammed Ruzaiq. “We collect fish, meat, potatoes, onions and flour to make our own food.”

The United Nations estimates that more than two million people have been displaced by the war, which intensified in 2015 when an Arab coalition intervened to try to restore President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi to power after the Houthis forced him into exile.

The war has killed more than 10,000 people, crippled the economy, caused a cholera epidemic that has killed nearly 2,000 people and pushed the country to the verge of famine.

The Saudi-led coalition denies Houthi accusations that it targets civilians or civilian property in its operations. Riyadh sees the Houthis as a proxy militia linked to regional rival Iran. Both Iran and the Houthis deny any military cooperation.

Fatema Hassan Marouai, 53, who was driven from her home in Hodeidah by economic hardships, said that apart from picking up food thrown away by better off Yemenis, some displaced people collect metal cans and plastic bottles to sell to merchants for some cash to cover daily needs.

Ayoub Mohammed Ruzaiq, 11, stands in a garbage dump where he collects recyclables and food near the Red Sea port city of Hodeidah, Yemen, January 13, 2018. REUTERS/Abduljabbar Zeyad

But she said income from that activity was also declining.

Merchants who once paid up to 50 Yemeni rials ($0.11) for a kg of plastic bottles, now offer 10 rials only, she said.

“We had been in a bad situation and the war made things worse,” said Fatema.

Ruzaiq family patriarch Mohammed Ruzaiq, 67, said Yemenis were not asking for any aid from outside, just a goodwill effort to end the war.

“All we want is for them to stop this war and this calamity and God almighty will provide for us,” he said.

(Reporting by Abduljabbar Zeyad, writing by Sami Aboudi, Editing by William Maclean)

United Nations hopes imports will help stave off famine in Yemen as diphtheria spreads

A nurse holds a premature baby in an incubator at the child care unit of a hospital in Sanaa, Yemen January 16, 2018.

By Stephanie Nebehay

GENEVA (Reuters) – United Nations aid agencies called on Tuesday for the Yemeni port of Hodeidah to remain open beyond Friday, the date set by a Saudi-led military coalition, to permit continued delivery of life-saving goods.

Yemen is the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, where 8.3 million people are entirely dependent on external food aid and 400,000 children suffer from severe acute malnutrition, a potentially lethal condition, they said.

The Arab coalition, under international pressure, eased a three-week blockade which was imposed on Yemeni ports and airports in November in response to a ballistic missile fired by the Houthi movement toward the Saudi capital Riyadh.

Four mobile cranes arrived in the important Houthi-controlled Hodeidah port, the U.N. said on Monday, after the coalition agreed to let them into Yemen, where nearly three years of war have pushed it to the verge of famine.

“The port in theory is going be open to the 19th of this month. Then we don’t know if the coalition will close or (leave) it open,” Meritxell Relano, U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Representative in Yemen, told a news briefing in Geneva.

“Obviously the feeling is that they extend this period so that the commercial goods can come in, but especially the fuel,” she said, speaking from the capital Sanaa.

Before the conflict, Hodeidah port handled around 70 percent of Yemen’s imports, including food and humanitarian supplies.

Fuel is vital to power water and sanitation stations to provide clean water and help avoid diseases, she said.

More than 11 million Yemeni children – virtually all – need humanitarian assistance, Relano said. UNICEF figures show 25,000 Yemeni babies die at birth or before the age of one month.

A child lies in a bed at a hospital in Sanaa, Yemen January 16, 2018. REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah

“Yemen is in the grips of the world’s biggest hunger crisis,” World Food Programme (WFP) spokeswoman Bettina Luescher said. “This is a nightmare that is happening right now.”

“We appeal to parties on (the) ground in order to stave off famine that we can continue regularly to get food in, to get medicines in, to get fuel in, be it from the humanitarian or the commercial side,” she said.

Luescher, asked about prospects for the Hodeidah port lifeline to remain open, replied: “Obviously since the cranes were imported and are operational, we are hopeful and optimistic that our work can continue.”

A diphtheria outbreak in Yemen is “spreading quickly”, with 678 cases and 48 associated deaths in four months, Fadela Chaib of the World Health Organisation said.

The number of cases has doubled since Dec 22, when the WHO reported 333 people affected by the highly-contagious disease, with 35 deaths. Ibb and Hodeidah are the worst-hit of the 19 affected governorates, Chaib said.

“We can stop the outbreak by providing antibiotics and also vaccinating,” she said. Some 2.5 million doses have been imported for a planned immunization campaign, she said.

(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; Editing by Larry King, William Maclean)

More than 8 million Yemenis ‘a step away from famine’: U.N.

GENEVA (Reuters) – Warring sides must let more aid get through to 8.4 million people who are “a step away from famine” in Yemen, a senior U.N. official said on Monday.

A Saudi-led military coalition fighting the Iran-aligned Houthi movement in Yemen’s civil war blockaded ports last month after a missile was fired toward Riyadh.

Jamie McGoldrick, the humanitarian coordinator for Yemen, said the blockade has since been eased, but the situation remained dire.

“The continuing blockade of ports is limiting supplies of fuel, food and medicines; dramatically increasing the number of vulnerable people who need help,” McGoldrick said in a statement.

“The lives of millions of people, including 8.4 million Yemenis who are a step away from famine, hinge on our ability to continue our operations and to provide health, safe water, food, shelter and nutrition support,” he added.

That marked an increase from past U.N. estimates of around 8 million people on the brink of famine.

The coalition accuses Iran of sending weapons to its Houthi allies, including missile parts, through Yemen’s main Hodeidah port, were most food supplies enter.

Saudi state television said on Monday a U.N delegation of experts has arrived in Riyadh to meet the coalition and the Yemeni government the coalition supports “to prevent the transfer of weapons and rockets to Houthis”.

Iran has denied supplying the Houthis with weapons, saying the U.S. and Saudi allegations are “baseless and unfounded”.

The United Nations says food shortages caused by the warring parties blocking supplies has created the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

The Saudis intervened in neighboring Yemen in 2015 after the Houthis advanced on the southern port city of Aden and forced President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi and his government into exile.

The conflict has killed more than 10,000 people, displaced more than 2 million and triggered a cholera epidemic that has infected about 1 million people.

The U.S. government on Friday called on the Saudi-led military coalition to facilitate the free flow of humanitarian aid to all of Yemen’s ports and through Sana’a airport.

A senior State Department official told reporters in Geneva on Monday that the United States had provided nearly $638 million in humanitarian assistance to Yemen in the U.S. fiscal year 2017 that ended on Sept 30.

“We have called on both sides to stop the fighting and seek a political solution to the problem,” the official said.

He said the United States had made its position clear to its allies to end the blockade and called on the Houthis to allow access for humanitarian supplies as “there are shocking shortage of food, fuel and medicines that are causing great suffering”.

(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay, Writing by Reem Shamseddine and Sami Aboudi; Editing by Andrew Heavens and Alison Williams)

Yemen’s ex-president Saleh shot dead after switching sides in civil war

A supporter of Yemen's then President Ali Abdullah Saleh waves a poster featuring him during a rally to show support for him in Sanaa September 9, 2011.

By Noah Browning and Sami Aboudi

SANAA/DUBAI (Reuters) – Veteran former president Ali Abdullah Saleh was killed in a roadside attack on Monday after switching sides in Yemen’s civil war, abandoning his Iran-aligned Houthi allies in favor of a Saudi-led coalition, foes and supporters said.

Sources in the Houthi militia said its fighters stopped Saleh’s armored vehicle with an RPG rocket outside the embattled capital Sanaa and then shot him dead. Sources in Saleh’s party confirmed he died in an attack on his convoy.

Unverified footage of his bloodied body lolling in a blanket circulated just days after he tore up his alliance with the Houthis following nearly three years in which they had jointly battled the Saudi-led coalition that intervened to try to reinstate Yemen’s internationally recognized government.

Saleh’s death, close watchers of Yemen say, will be a huge moral boost for the Houthis and a major blow to the Saudi-led coalition. Any hope of the coalition that Saleh could have been bought off to help them against the Houthis has now been dashed and the Houthis have destroyed a powerful new adversary.

The coalition must either continue its long war in Yemen or offer compromises to bring the Houthis to the negotiating table.

In a televised speech on Monday, Houthi leader Abdul Malik al-Houthi congratulated the Yemeni people for what he described as a victory against a “conspiracy of treason” engineered by the group’s Gulf Arab enemies. He did not mention Saleh’s death.

Supporters of the Houthis drove through city streets blasting celebratory war songs.

Saleh, 75, had said in a speech on Saturday that he was ready for a “new page” in ties with the coalition and called the Houthis a “coup militia”, leading them to accuse him of betrayal.

Warfare between the former allies has torn densely populated Sanaa for days as Houthi fighters seized control of much of the capital and on Monday blew up Saleh’s house while coalition jets bombed their own positions.

A Houthi militant mans a checkpoint as clashes with forces loyal to Yemen’s former president Ali Abdullah Saleh continue in Sanaa, Yemen December 4, 2017. REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah

The end of their alliance could transform the course of war in the Arabian Peninsula country after two years of attrition along mostly static front lines, which gave the Saudi-led coalition a new advantage over the Houthis.

Stalemate in Yemen has contributed to a human catastrophe as a Saudi-led blockade and internal fighting has thrust millions of people to the brink of famine and accelerated the spread of deadly epidemics.

Eyes will now turn to Saleh’s political allies and military commanders, whom analysts credited with aiding the Houthi march southwards in 2014 to dominate swathes of western Yemen.

“What happens now and whether his family and political allies fight on is not yet clear,” said Adam Baron, a Yemen expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

“His people will be angry, and many will certainly be out for blood, but there are many in the middle especially among the tribes who will fall with whoever appears stronger,” he said.

“The (Saudi-led) coalition may have put a lot of their eggs in Saleh’s basket, only for it to fall over now. They appeared to strongly support his attempt to confront the Houthis and now that bid may have failed.”

HEADS OF SNAKES

A Western diplomat told Reuters: “Brutal revenge could be the only way forward for the Saleh clan.”

The Saudi-led coalition, the diplomat added, could aim for a lightning attack on key urban centers that have eluded their grasp in years of war.

“Let’s see if they take advantage of the fog of war and try to take Sanaa or (the Red Sea port) of Hodeidah.”

Saleh once compared his 33-year rule over Yemen to “dancing on the heads of snakes”, a period that included unification of conservative north and Marxist south Yemen, civil war, uprisings, Islamist militant campaigns and tribal feuds.

But he was forced from power in 2012 after an Arab Spring uprising that left him wounded by an attempted assassination, leading to a Saudi-brokered political transition.

He fled to Saudi Arabia, his former ally, for treatment of his injuries and the princes in Riyadh allowed him to return to Yemen months later – something they came to bitterly regret as he undermined the transition plan and later joined the Houthis.

That set the stage for his final role – that of ally to the Houthi movement which he had previously fought six times during his own presidency, and to Iran, the Houthis’ political backer.

But Houthi and Saleh loyalist forces jostled for supremacy over the territory they ran together, including Sanaa, which the Houthis seized in September 2014, and their feud burst into open combat on Nov. 29.

The maneuvering ended on Monday, as footage circulating on social media appeared to show his corpse, a deep wound in the side of its head, wrapped in a red blanket and being loaded onto a pick-up truck as tribal fighters waved their weapons.

“Praise God!” and “Hey Ali Affash!” (another name for Saleh) they were shouting.

Officials in his own General People’s Congress party said Saleh was killed outside Sanaa in an RPG and gun assault on his convoy along with the GPC’s assistant secretary general Yasser al-Awadi.

His death was confirmed by Saleh’s nephew and former chief of Yemen’s security forces, Yahya Mohammed Abdullah Saleh, who hailed him as a martyr on his official Facebook page.

STREET BATTLES EASE IN SANAA

Residents reported that the situation in Sanaa had calmed. Most people were indoors, and streets were deserted amid a state of fear as the Houthis asserted full control. Saudi-led aircraft continued to fly overhead.

Houthi spokesman Mohammed Abdul Salam claimed significant gains in the battle for Sanaa on Monday.

“With the aid and approval of God, the security forces backed up by wide popular support were able last night to cleanse the areas in which the militias of treason and betrayal were deployed,” he said in a statement.

The Houthi movement’s TV channel al-Masirah and witnesses said Houthi fighters had seized the downtown home of Saleh’s nephew Tareq, an army general.

Residents said the warring sides traded heavy automatic and artillery fire as the Houthis advanced in the central Political District, which is a redoubt of Saleh and his family.

“We lived through days of terror. Houthi tanks have been firing and the shells were falling on our neighborhood,” said Mohammed al-Madhaji, who lives in the frontline district.

“The fighting has been so violent we feel we could die at any moment. We can’t get out of our homes.”

Houthi media and political sources also reported the Houthis advancing towards Saleh’s birthplace in a village outside Sanaa where he maintained a fortified palace.

Saleh cultivated Yemen’s national army for decades and put key units under the command of relatives, but the speed of the Houthis’ apparent gains over his partisans indicates they have a strong upper hand in the lands they once held together.

Nearly three years of Houthi control over key ministries and state media has helped convert much of Yemeni society toward their brand of religiously-inspired militarism while key tribal and military commanders did not flock to Saleh’s uprising.

This may mean that Houthi positions in nationwide battlefronts against pro-Saudi forces will remain robust with the overall stalemate dragging on.

(Additional reporting by Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; Writing by Noah Browning, Angus McDowall and Samia Nakhoul; editing by Mark Heinrich)

Yemen blockade needs to be fully wound down: U.N. aid chief

By Tom Miles

GENEVA (Reuters) – The Saudi-led military coalition must fully lift its blockade on Yemen, where seven or eight million are “right on the brink of famine”, U.N. humanitarian chief Mark Lowcock said on Friday, but he declined to say if maintaining such a blockade was legal.

“That blockade has been partially wound down but not fully wound down. It needs to be fully wound down if we are to avoid an atrocious humanitarian tragedy involving the loss of millions of lives, the like of which the world has not seen for many decades,” he said.

The coalition, fighting the armed Houthi movement in Yemen with backing from the United States, Britain and other countries, eased the blockade this week, allowing aid ships into the Red Sea ports of Hodeidah and Salif, as well as U.N. flights to Sanaa.

U.N. humanitarian officials have said Yemen cannot rely on humanitarian aid alone but must have commercial imports too, because it relies on imports for the vast majority of its food, fuel and medicine.

The coalition wants tighter U.N. verification and inspection for commercial ships entering the Houthi-controlled port of Hodeidah, the most important hub.

“I’ve called for five things in respect of the Saudi blockade,” Lowcock said. “Some of them have happened like the resumption of humanitarian air services, like partial reopening of the ports of Hodeidah and Saleef on the Red Sea. What I’m interested in is finding solutions.”

According to a 2015 U.N. Security Council resolution on Yemen, “arbitrary denial of humanitarian access and depriving civilians of objects indispensable to their survival, including wilfully impeding relief supply and access, may constitute a violation of international humanitarian law.”

Lowcock, launching the U.N.’s humanitarian appeal for 2018, declined to say if Saudi Arabia and its partners were in breach of the law, but said the world body had consistently called on all sides to uphold their obligations.

“It is absolutely essential that people uphold their international obligations. Wars have rules and they need to be complied with,” he said.

“I’m not a lawyer but clearly international humanitarian law includes a requirement to facilitate unhindered access for aid agencies, and that’s what I’ve been trying to secure both in what I’ve said publicly and also in my private dialogue,” he told Reuters.

(Reporting by Tom Miles; Editing by Alison Williams, William Maclean)

Famine survey warns of thousands dying daily in Yemen if ports stay closed

By Tom Miles

GENEVA (Reuters) – A U.S.-funded famine survey said on Tuesday that thousands of Yemenis could die daily if a Saudi-led military coalition does not lift its blockade on the country’s key ports.

The warning came a day after the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said 2.5 million people in Yemen’s crowded cities had no access to clean water, raising the risk that a cholera epidemic will spread.

Using the internationally recognized IPC 5-point scale for classifying food security, the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) said that even before the current blockade, 15 million people were in “crisis” (IPC Phase 3) or worse.

“Therefore, a prolonged closure of key ports risks an unprecedented deterioration in food security to Famine (IPC Phase 5) across large areas of the country,” it said.

It said famine is likely in many areas within three or four months if ports remain closed, with some less accessible areas at even greater risk. In such a scenario, shortages of food and fuel would drive up prices, and a lack of medical supplies would exacerbate life-threatening diseases.

“Thousands of deaths would occur each day due to the lack of food and disease outbreaks,” said FEWS NET, which is funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Famine remained likely even if the southern port of Aden is open, its report said, adding that all Yemeni ports should be reopened to essential imports.

The United Nations has said the Saudi-led coalition must allow aid in through Hodeidah port, controlled by the Houthis, the Saudis’ enemies in the war in Yemen.

U.N. humanitarian agencies have issued dire warnings about the impact of the blockade, although U.N. officials have declined to directly criticize Saudi Arabia.

Jan Egeland, head of the Norwegian Refugee Council and a former U.N. aid chief, was blunt in his criticism, however.

“US, UK & other allies of Saudi has only weeks to avoid being complicit in a famine of Biblical proportions. Lift the blockade now,” he wrote in a tweet.

Last year Saudi Arabia was accused by then U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon of exerting “unacceptable” undue pressure to keep itself off a blacklist of countries that kill children in conflict, after sources told Reuters that Riyadh had threatened to cut some U.N. funding. Saudi Arabia denied this.

(Reporting by Tom Miles; Editing by Catherine Evans)

Yemen set to run out of fuel and vaccine in a month: UNICEF

A boy is being treated at a malnutrition treatment center in Sanaa, Yemen November 4, 2017.

GENEVA (Reuters) – Yemen’s stocks of fuel and vaccines will run out in a month unless a Saudi-led military coalition allows aid into the blockaded port of Hodeidah and Sanaa airport, UNICEF’s representative in the country said on Friday.

Meritxell Relano, speaking by phone to reporters in Geneva, said fuel prices had risen 60 percent and there were urgent concerns about a diphtheria outbreak, as well as food shortages because of the port closure.

“The situation that was already catastrophic is just getting worse,” she said. “The impact of this is unimaginable in terms of health and diseases.”

After two years of civil war, Yemen has 7 million people on the brink of famine and has had 900,000 suspected cholera cases in the past six months.

The number of new cases has fallen consistently for the past eight weeks, according to data from the World Health Organization.

But progress against cholera, which has killed 2,196 people, could be reversed by the blockade, WHO spokeswoman Fadela Chaib told a regular U.N. briefing in Geneva.

“If the closure is not stopped in the coming days, we may see that the progress is stopped,” Chaib said. “We can see even more cases and more deaths as a result of not being able to get access to people.”

The closure of Hodeidah port prevented a ship setting sail from Djibouti with 250 tonnes of WHO medical supplies on Wednesday. Trauma kits in particular are running short.

“If the hostilities continue and the ports remain closed, we will not be able to perform life-saving surgeries or provide basic healthcare,” Chaib said.

(Reporting by Tom Miles; Editing by Andrew Roche)

Hungry South Sudanese refugees risk death in return home for food

By Jason Patinkin

PALORINYA, Uganda (Reuters) – Oliver Wani found sanctuary from South Sudan’s civil war in a Ugandan refugee camp. But when the food ran out, he returned home only to be killed in the conflict he had fled.

The 45-year-old farmer was one of more than a million South Sudanese living in sprawling camps just across the border in northern Uganda, seeking refuge from the four-year war that has devastated their homeland.

But funding gaps and organizational problems often delay or reduce their meager rations, driving some desperate families back to the lands they fled and underscoring the struggle to cope with Africa’s biggest refugee crisis in two decades.

Refugees from South Sudan have been arriving in Uganda at an average rate of 35,000 a month this year. The Bidi Bidi camp was home to 285,000 people at the end of September, according to the U.N.’s refugee agency, making it the biggest in Africa.

The U.N. agency (UNHCR) said funding had only covered 32 percent of $674 million requested to help refugees in Uganda in 2017 and the U.N.’s World Food Programme (WFP) said it was facing a $71 million shortfall for the next six months.

Wani, who cared for his elderly parents, received no food in October because distributions had been delayed, his father Timon said. The memory of the crops Oliver had left behind proved too tempting and he returned to South Sudan to find food.

Two weeks later, other returning refugees recognized his remains alongside another dead refugee on a forest path in South Sudan, where the ground was littered with bullet casings.

“He went back to look for food,” said Timon, a tall, thin man who wiped away tears with his handkerchief as he spoke at a memorial service for his first-born child in the Palorinya refugee camp. “I’m heartbroken.”

DESPERATE REFUGEES

The four-year war in oil-rich South Sudan, a country only founded in 2011, has forced more than a third of its 12 million citizens to flee their homes. Tens of thousands have died, some in ethnic killings, others from starvation and disease.

Palorinya is the second biggest camp in northern Uganda after Bidi Bidi and alone houses 185,000 refugees.

Each refugee is supposed to get 12 kg of grain, 6 kg of dry beans, cooking oil and salt each month, but the U.N.’s WFP said this was delayed in October because grain was scarce in Uganda and the roads to Palorinya were bad.

Food distributions did not start camp until Oct. 26, WFP said. It takes two weeks to complete a distribution, so tens of thousands of refugees did not get any food that month.

Desperate, some returned to the war zone. At least eight refugees from Palorinya were killed in South Sudan after returning to look for food in October, according to family members and the Anglican church, which tracks civilian deaths.

In August and September, when rations were distributed normally, just two refugees from the camp were killed when they returned to find food, the church diocese in South Sudan’s volatile Kajo Keji region said.

Modi Scopas John, chairman of a Refugee Welfare Committee in Palorinya, said refugees were returning home every day.

“If you have nothing to eat, what do you do?” he asked, perched on a plastic chair under a spindly tree. “You have to look for food.”

FOOD SHORTAGES

Wani was killed in Kajo Keji, where the government and two rebel groups are battling for control in a war sparked by a feud between President Salva Kiir and his former deputy Riek Machar.

Next to Wani lay the body of Yassin Mori, 35, who had also left Palorinya to look for food, according to Mori’s two brothers who ventured into South Sudan to look for him.

Mori left two wives and nine children behind.

“Now we need support because we are left with his children and widows,” Taha Igga, one of the brothers, said at a memorial service in the Ugandan refugee camp.

Mutabazi Caleb, from aid group World Vision, which runs the distributions, said that Palorinya is two months behind other camps in its food distributions.

WFP said it had substituted half the cereal ration with money in September in some other camps so refugees could buy food and was expanding its infrastructure to prevent future delays.

But refugees said even when food arrives, it doesn’t last a month. Of the 12 kg of grain, refugees said they sell one to pay for grinding the rest into flour, and another to buy soap, which is in short supply.

They also complained that the beans were sometimes inedible.

“They are not okay, others are rotten, and they are smelling,” said mother-of-four Liong Viola, 32, picking through her sack of shriveled legumes during an Oct. 26 distribution.

WFP country director El Khidir Daloum said it was investigating the complaint and, “is committed to providing our beneficiaries with the highest quality of food”.

John, the Refugee Welfare Committee chairman, said he urged people to stay in the camps.

“At least let us die here of the hunger rather than go back to South Sudan and be killed like a chicken,” he said.

But hungry refugees often ignore the pleas. At dusk last Saturday, Pastor Charles Mubarak packed extra clothes into a plastic bag to take back into South Sudan where he hoped to harvest cassava fields he left behind when he fled in January.

“As a family, we are 10 in number, and I’m not in position to feed them,” he said. “If I get killed I get killed once, but dying of hunger is too difficult.”

Mubarak kissed each neatly folded shirt as he placed them in the bag.

“If they give us the food rations, I wouldn’t think of going back to South Sudan,” he said. “Food is life.”

(Reporting by Jason Patinkin; editing by Katharine Houreld and David Clarke)

U.N. calls for Saudi-led coalition to re-open aid lifeline to Yemen

By Stephanie Nebehay

GENEVA (Reuters) – The United Nations urged the Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen to re-open an aid lifeline to bring imported food and medicine into Yemen, whose 7 million people are facing famine in a country that is already the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

The Saudi-led coalition fighting the Houthi movement in Yemen said on Monday it would close all air, land and sea ports to the Arabian Peninsula country to stem the flow of arms from Iran.

The Saudis and their allies say the Houthis get weapons from their arch-foe, Iran. Iran denies the charges and blames the conflict in Yemen on Riyadh.

Humanitarian operations – including U.N. aid flights – are currently “blocked” because air and sea ports in Yemen are closed, Jens Laerke of the U.N. Office for the Coordination for Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) told a news briefing on Tuesday.

The Saudi-led coalition has told the world body to “inform all commercial vessels at Hodeidah and Saleef ports to leave”, he said, referring to Red Sea ports controlled by the Houthis.

“We call for all air and sea ports to remain open to ensure food, fuel and medicines can enter the country,” Laerke said.

“The situation is catastrophic in Yemen, it is the worst food crisis we are looking at in the world today, 7 million people are on the brink of famine, millions of people being kept alive by our humanitarian operations,” he said.

The price of fuel jumped 60 percent “overnight” in Yemen and the price of cooking gas doubled, as long lines of cars are reported forming at petrol stations, he added.

“We hear reports this morning of prices of cooking gas and petrol for cars and so on is already spiraling out of control,” he said. “So this is an access problem of colossal dimensions right now.”

Rupert Colville, U.N. human rights spokesman, said the office would study whether the blockade amounted to “collective punishment”, banned under international law but hoped that it would be temporary.

The U.N. human rights office was deeply concerned at a series of attacks in Yemen over the past week that have killed dozens of civilians, including children, at markets and homes, he said.

These included at least nine air strikes on the Houthi-held city of Sanaa since Saturday, when a missile was fired from Yemen toward the Saudi capital of Riyadh, he said.

The World Health Organization (WHO) also called for medical aid to be allowed to enter Yemen to combat a cholera epidemic which has caused 908,702 suspected cases and 2,194 deaths since the outbreak began in April, WHO spokeswoman Fadela Chaib said.

(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay,; editing by Larry King)

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