TEHRAN (Iran News) – Flights transporting Yemeni medical patients from the war-torn country continued Saturday when a second plane carrying 24 patients took off from Sana’a bound for Jordan’s capital, the UN health agency said.
The UN flights, which began Feb. 3, are seen as a humanitarian breakthrough in the more than 5-year-old Saudi-led war against the Arab world’s poorest country.
Among those who left Sana’a on Saturday was a 30-year-old cancer patient Entisar. WHO said cancer had spread all over her body.
“The physical & psychological pain is unbearable; all I want is to feel better,” she was quoted as saying by the UN agency. Her last name was not given.
Welcoming the arrival of the second flight to Jordan’s capital, Amman, UN envoy to Yemen Martin Griffiths said the two flights transported patients to “receive life-saving medical care currently unavailable in Yemen.”
The airport in Sana’a has been closed to civilian traffic since 2015, effectively imprisoning thousands of Yemenis requiring urgent or complex medical treatment that the country’s war-ravaged health care system is incapable of providing. Only United Nations flights use the airport.
Saudi Arabia and a number of its allies launched a devastating campaign against Yemen in March 2015, with the goal of bringing the government of former president Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi back to power and eliminating the Yemeni Houthi Ansarullah movement, whose fighters have been helping the Yemeni army significantly in defending the country against invaders since the onset of war.
The US-based Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), a nonprofit conflict-research organization, estimates that the war has so far claimed more than 100,000 lives.
- source : Tasnim, Irannews
