Yemen's Houthi rebels accused of diverting food aid from hungry

The head of the United Nations food agency has accused Yemen’s Houthi rebels of diverting food from the country’s hungriest people and threatened to suspend food aid, The Guardian reported.

David Beasley, executive director of the World Food Programme (WFP), said the agency had found “serious evidence” that food supplies had been diverted in the capital, Sana’a and other Houthi-controlled areas in the country, which is in the midst of a four-year civil war. He called on the Houthis to implement agreements that would allow the UN agency to operate independently.

“If we do not receive these assurances, then we will begin a phased suspension of food assistance, most likely toward the end of this week,” Beasley said at the Security Council. “If and when we do initiate suspension, we will continue our nutrition program for malnourished children, pregnant women and new mothers.”

Beasley said the WFP has insisted on, and the Houthis finally agreed to, registration and biometric identification of beneficiaries as well as monitoring back in December, but the agency has faced blocks in implementing these measures since.

The humanitarian situation in Yemen is “catastrophic”, he said. The war has killed at least 70,000 people, left half the country’s 22 million population food-insecure, and sparked the worst cholera outbreak in modern history.

“Despite the immense suffering of 20 million Yemenis who do not have enough to eat, we continue to face fierce resistance to simply to do our job to keep people alive,” Beasley said.

The agency saw “early improvement” in early 2019, he said, but since then had received “concerning information”, including that 33% of respondents in Saada, a Houthi-controlled region in the north, had not received food aid, and that a “hotline” had detected 33 instances of misappropriation of food. In addition, 66% of staff monitoring visits had been blocked, he said.