Houthis claim over 48,000 dead or injured in eight years of Yemen war

Ministry run by Iran-backed rebels says it documented 15,615 deaths, including 3,160 children and 3,216 women

Yemenis visit the graves of people killed in the country's civil war, at a cemetery in Sanaa. EPA

Yemen’s Houthi rebels said 48,217 people had been killed or injured in the country's civil war that began in late 2014.

The Houthis' ministry of health and population said it documented 15,615 deaths, including 3,160 children and 3,216 women. A total of 32,602 were injured, including 4,592 children and 3,263.

The wording of the statement, released by the Houthi ministry on Wednesday, suggested that the Iran-backed rebels were reporting casualties only in areas under their control and caused as a direct result of military operations.

The numbers of child casualties reported is far lower than estimates by the UN, which says more than 11,000 children are known to have been killed or maimed in Yemen's civil war since it escalated about eight years ago.

“The true toll of this conflict is likely to be far higher,” the UN children's fund said in a December 2022 report on the conflict, which has created what the UN described as the world's worst humanitarian crisis.

“Thousands of children have lost their lives, hundreds of thousands more remain at risk of death from preventable disease or starvation,” said Unicef executive director Catherine Russell.

Yemen's war broke out after Iran-backed Houthi rebels seized the capital Sanaa in late 2014, prompting a Saudi-led coalition to intervene in March 2015 at the request of the internationally recognised government.

Unicef estimated at least 3,774 child deaths between March 2015 and September 2022.

About 2.2 million Yemeni children are acutely malnourished, a quarter of them aged under five, and most are at extreme risk from cholera, measles and other vaccine-preventable diseases, Unicef said.

The war in Yemen would have claimed 377,000 lives by the end of 2021, through both direct and indirect impacts, the UN Development Programme estimated in a report last year.

Nearly 60 per cent of deaths will have been caused by indirect impacts such as lack of safe water, hunger and disease, it said, suggesting that fighting will have directly killed more than 150,000 people.

Earlier this month, Riyadh and Tehran agreed to restore diplomatic ties after seven years, spurring hope it would lead to calm in Yemen, where the regional heavyweights back opposing sides.