IOM says nearly 300,000 Yemenis have been displaced this year, most since August
Yemen Herald News 
ADEN, Yemen — Nearly 300,000 people have been displaced inside Yemen this year, and almost all of them fled after the start of August, the International Organization for Migration said.
The agency recorded 49,388 displaced households, or 296,328 individuals, who moved at least once between Jan. 1 and Oct. 24, according to its latest Displacement Tracking Matrix report.
Of those, 45,868 households, or 275,245 people, were displaced between Aug. 1 and Oct. 24. That is about 93 percent of all displacement registered this year.
The account of the report rests on IOM’s own figures as relayed by the news site Yemen Online on Oct. 28. Yemen Herald found no second independent origin for the weekly totals, and the agency has not posted the dataset on its public portal.
In the week of Oct. 18 to Oct. 24 alone, 2,269 households were displaced, the agency said. That is 13,614 people in seven days.
Lahj recorded the highest number of newly displaced families that week, with 900 households moving inside the governorate.
Taiz followed with 600 households. Aden recorded 553, most of them arriving from neighbouring Lahj.
The agency also identified 2,626 households that had not been counted in the previous reporting period. Those cases were added to the cumulative total for the year.
The weekly figures sit alongside a broader count IOM issued days earlier. As of Oct. 23, the agency put the number of people displaced since early September at more than 268,000, from 44,736 families, Asharq Al-Awsat reported on Oct. 27.
Those families are sheltering in 62 districts across 10 governorates, according to the same account.
The movement is concentrated in western Taiz, Lahj and southern Hodeidah, according to the same report.
Aden was hosting more than 42,000 displaced people, more than double the figure recorded on Oct. 7. Lahj was hosting about 67,000.
Abdusattor Esoev, IOM’s chief of mission in Yemen, said the response was running behind the need. “Without urgent support, more families will go without assistance that could save their lives,” he said.
He said funding was falling far short. The agency put its shortfall at $30 million over the next six months.
Other donors have announced new spending. KSrelief, the Saudi aid agency, has launched projects it expects to benefit more than 3.4 million people in Yemen.
The agency says Saudi Arabia has provided more than $29 billion in assistance to the country over the past decade.
Some of those leaving are not staying in the country. As of Oct. 17, 3,836 Yemenis had arrived in Djibouti, about half of them children, IOM said. The route crosses the Bab al-Mandab strait from Yemen’s west coast.
The UN refugee agency has issued a separate tally. More than 250,000 people had been displaced inside Yemen since the war reignited in July, UNHCR said in a statement on Oct. 20.
Taiz accounted for 76 percent of departures in that count and was hosting 52 percent of the newly displaced, the agency said. Lahij was hosting 23 percent and Aden 13 percent.
About 33,700 families still needed shelter assistance, according to UNHCR.
Matthew Saltmarsh, a spokesperson for the agency, set out the priorities at a news conference in Geneva. “The most immediate needs that we’ve been able to identify are around shelter, food, and multi-purpose cash assistance,” he said.
The three counts are not directly comparable. IOM’s annual figure runs from the start of January, its narrower count runs from early September, and the UNHCR total runs from July.
Water systems are among the services under strain. Fighting and fuel shortages in Taiz threaten supplies serving an estimated three million people, including at least 1.6 million children, UNICEF has warned.
The World Food Programme said about 800,000 people had been cut off from food assistance in Taiz and other affected areas, Arab News reported on Oct. 29.
Human Rights Watch has said the Houthi siege of Taiz could amount to the war crime of using starvation as a method of warfare.
The Houthis have not published a response to the displacement figures. The group disputes accounts of its conduct around Taiz issued by the internationally recognised government and by rights organisations.
The displacement adds to needs that predate this year’s fighting. More than 22 million people in Yemen required humanitarian assistance, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in the response plan it published in March.
That plan recorded 18.3 million people as acutely food insecure. It counted more than 2.2 million children under five as acutely malnourished, 516,157 of them severely.
The plan put the number of internally displaced people in the country at 5.2 million before this year’s escalation. It sought $2.16 billion to reach 12 million people.
IOM’s Displacement Tracking Matrix relies on field reporting and does not claim to capture every movement. The agency says access constraints mean its data is not representative of all displacement occurring in Yemen.
The system counts households and converts them to population figures using an average family size.
Lahj, the governorate that recorded the most new displacement in the week to Oct. 24, lies between Taiz and Aden on the road south.
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