Fire engulfs WFP warehouses in Yemen's Hudaydah port
A huge fire has engulfed warehouses belonging to the UN's World Food Programme (WFP) in Yemen’s western port city of Hudaydah.
The blaze which broke out in the early hours of the morning on Saturday destroyed the warehouses filled with cooking fuel and foodstuff for humanitarian aid, a local source told Yemen's Saba news agency.
The source also pointed out that the fire is still raging despite efforts made by firefighters.
"The fire destroyed huge amounts of fuel and humanitarian aid and foodstuff," a WFP employee said, adding that there would be an investigation to determine the cause.
Hudaydah, a strategic port on the Red Sea, handles the bulk of Yemen's imports, including critically-needed food and aid supplies.
The warehouses also contained hundreds of thousands of mattresses meant for those displaced by Saudi Arabia’s military aggression against Yemen, port workers said.
Saudi Arabia has been incessantly pounding Yemen since March 2015 in an attempt to crush the popular Houthi Ansarullah movement and reinstate former president, Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, who is a staunch ally of the Riyadh regime. The Arab kingdom has also imposed a blockade on its impoverished neighbor, causing a dire humanitarian situation.
At least 13,600 people have been killed since the onset of the campaign. Much of the Arabian Peninsula country's infrastructure, including hospitals, schools and factories, has been reduced to rubble due to the war.
The Saudi-led war has also triggered a deadly cholera epidemic across Yemen.
According to the World Health Organization’s latest tally, the cholera outbreak has killed 2,167 people since the end of April 2017 and is suspected to have infected 841,906.
Additionally, the UN has described the current level of hunger in Yemen as “unprecedented,” emphasizing that 17 million people were food insecure in the country.
The world body says that 6.8 million, meaning almost one in four people, do not have enough food and rely entirely on external assistance.
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