WHO says 838 killed and 3,643 wounded in Yemen since early August

Spread the Word

ADEN, Yemen — The World Health Organization said 838 people have been killed and 3,643 wounded in Yemen since fighting escalated on 6 August.

The figures bring recorded casualties to 4,481 over seven weeks. WHO issued the report on Sunday.

The count comes from Yemen’s Health Emergency Operations Center, which collects returns from hospitals and health facilities. WHO publishes the centre’s data in a periodic situation report on the escalation.

Between 19 and 26 September the centre recorded 809 new casualties, according to the report. Of those, 164 were deaths and 645 were injuries.

Deaths accounted for about 20 percent of casualties logged that week. The share was 24 percent in the previous reporting period and 17 percent in the one before it.

The week’s return works out at about 100 casualties a day.

WHO named Lahj governorate as the heaviest front in the latest period. Much of the toll fell on the districts of Al-Madharibah wa Ras Al-Arah, on the coast north of the Bab al-Mandab strait.

The report also recorded casualties in Al-Hudaydah, Taiz and Marib. It named Mayyun Island, the Marib districts of Al-Jubah and Sirwah, and the Red Sea port of Mokha.

Mokha and Mayyun Island sit on the approaches to the Bab al-Mandab strait, the southern entrance to the Red Sea.

A second United Nations body has documented deaths over the same period from its own monitoring. The UN human rights office said on 24 September it had verified the killing of 32 civilians since 1 August, among them 15 children and three women.

That count is narrower than the health centre’s. The rights office records only deaths its staff can verify and does not include combatants.

The office said it had received reports of three attacks on sites housing displaced people in Marib governorate, on 7 August and on 7 and 9 September.

Volker Türk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said in the same statement that the people of Yemen cannot withstand another full-scale conflict.

The UN humanitarian affairs office reported damage to medical infrastructure. It said nine health facilities had been damaged or attacked since the escalation began, and that ambulances came under attack on a Friday in September, killing two responders.

WHO said it had delivered surgical supplies and antibiotics to four hospitals in the affected governorates.

The UN humanitarian affairs office said funding shortfalls and access constraints were hampering the response. It said aid teams had reached only part of the newly displaced population.

The health system absorbing the wounded was already thin. UNICEF said on 16 September that about 60 percent of health facilities in Yemen are fully functional, and that 17.8 million people lack adequate access to health care and water.

The children’s agency said services had been disrupted at 26 health facilities it supports. It put the number of children under five who are acutely malnourished at 2.2 million, about 515,000 of them severely.

UNICEF said 12.2 million children in Yemen need humanitarian assistance. Mobile nutrition teams screened nearly 2,900 children during the escalation and found more than one in four acutely malnourished, about 200 of them severely.

The UN Population Fund said more than 2,700 pregnant women were among those displaced by the fighting. It said about 300 of them were expected to give birth within two weeks of its assessment.

Displacement has run alongside the casualty count. The International Organization for Migration recorded 129,438 people displaced by 21 September, up from 118,086 three days earlier.

Taiz governorate accounted for 73,494 of those, according to the migration agency. It recorded 33,828 in Lahj, 8,946 in Aden and 8,244 in Al Hodeidah.

The rights office put the displacement figure at about 125,000 in its 24 September statement. The UN humanitarian affairs office counted 21,000 households displaced since 1 August.

The rights office described the fighting as a Houthi advance down Yemen’s western coast toward the Bab al-Mandab strait, opposed by government forces. Front lines had been broadly static since a UN-brokered truce took effect in April 2022.

Yemen held about 4.8 million displaced people before August, accumulated over a decade of war.

Some have left the country. The UN refugee agency said nearly 3,000 people reached Djibouti from Yemen in under a week in September, crossing the Bab al-Mandab in small boats. It has recorded more than 3,100 arrivals since the escalation began.

The UN humanitarian response plan for Yemen, published in March, put more than 22 million people in need of assistance and 18.3 million in acute food insecurity. It sought 2.16 billion dollars to reach 12 million people.

UN agencies said in September that funding shortfalls and access restrictions were limiting what they could deliver to newly displaced families.

The health centre’s returns do not separate civilians from combatants, and WHO has not published a breakdown. The agency reports the figures as received from health facilities.

Neither the government nor the Houthi authorities have published a casualty tally for the period that can be set against the centre’s count. Yemen Herald could not independently verify the facility-level returns behind the WHO total.

The fighting began on 6 August and widened through September along the Red Sea coast and on the approaches to Taiz.

WHO said its next situation report would cover the week to 3 October.