Hundreds of civilians have been killed and injured by landmines and unexploded ordnance (UXO) in Yemen, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has revealed.
In an update, the OCHA’s office in Yemen said that it had found that 343 civilians had been killed and injured by explosive threats in the last six months, during the UN-brokered ceasefire.
The UN-brokered truce went into effect on April 2 and expired on October 2 after the Houthis refused to extend it.
On Twitter, the organisation warned that landmines and unexploded ordnance explosions continue to inflict heavy losses on civilians in Yemen.
“Mines and UXO emerged as the major cause of civilian casualties between April and September 2022,” the update read.
“Landmines and UXO continue to take a heavy toll on civilians in Yemen. Landmines and UXO were responsible for 343 civilian casualties, including 95 deaths and 248 injuries between April and September 2022.”
Earlier, in April 2022, the United Nations said that 1,400 civilians, including 689 children, had been killed or injured in Yemen as a result of landmines and explosive remnants of war since 2018.
Human rights reports, meanwhile, indicate that the Houthi militia planted more than two million mines, killing and injuring more than 20,000 civilians since the beginning of the Yemen conflict.
Earlier this month, Project Masam welcomed Cornelius N Nagbe, an international law specialist, and member of the United Nations Security Council Panel of Eminent Experts on Yemen.
Given the sheer scope and number of the violations occurring in Yemen in the past eight years since the conflict started, the UN Group of Experts said it is prioritising the examination of various categories of violations and incidents according to their gravity, intensity and significance – including the indiscriminate planting of landmines across several Yemeni governorates.
During the high-level meeting, Masam experts provided information and evidence to Mr Nagbe and his delegation of how locally-manufactured landmines cleared in Yemen are today more complex and sophisticated than those previously cleared, and provided information of districts where landmines were retrieved close to civilian establishments, the impact of these landmines on civilians, livestock and livelihoods, and landmines provenance.
