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Foreign Correspondent: Aug 23

Foreign Correspondent looks at the children who are dying from bombs, bullets and hunger in Yemen.

yemen

This week on Foreign Correspondent Sophie McNeill and cameraman Aaron Hollett report from the Yemen war zone.

In a playground of international powers, “The War on Children” looks at the children who are dying from bombs, bullets and hunger.

A Night Strike: “I want to go out and play,” says eight-year-old Faris as he lies in his hospital bed. Then the burned and wounded boy turns pleadingly to his grandfather: “Will I live? Will I live?”

Faris and his family were asleep when a missile hit their house, killing his mother and brother.

A Wedding Party: “We didn’t expect them to hit a wedding,” says Mohammed. He was among the wedding guests who had just finished feasting; the singing and dancing was starting up. Then came the air strike – leaving as many as 40 people dead, among them a little girl named Jood, aged five. She was Mohammed’s daughter.

“We recognised her from her hair ribbon,” he says. “There was no face.”

A Starving Child: “We don’t sleep day or night worrying about him,” says the father of 17-month-old Eissa. The boy is severely malnourished and needs to move into the hospital’s Intensive Care Unit. His family can’t afford it.

A Boy Soldier: “Are you going to watch your country and your kids and families destroyed?” laments another father, as he buries his 16-year-old son, a child soldier taken by a sniper’s bullet.

“Why is the whole world silent about Yemen?”

Middle East Correspondent Sophie McNeill travels to Yemen to report on a war that has now claimed more than 6500 lives, many of them children, in just 17 months.

Civilians make up nearly half of all casualties and, according to the UN, they have been deliberately targeted by the US-backed Saudi coalition. Hospitals, schools and homes have been bombed. Nearly 3 million people have fled their homes; 14 million are going hungry; 1.3 million children are severely malnourished.

“The hospitals, the schools, public buildings have not been spared in this war and that’s been a tragedy,” the UN’s Jamie McGoldrick tells Sophie McNeill in the capital Sana’a.

McNeill and cameraman Aaron Hollett travel under heavy security to the capital Sana’a and surrounding towns amid rising expectations of the conflict intensifying. They get out just before Saudi-led forces step up their bombing raids and push their troops closer to Sana’a.

As McNeill discovers, hospitals confront not only a steady stream of casualties amid a constant threat of air strikes, but also a lack of equipment and drugs. Thousands of dialysis patients are at risk; there are no medicines for 40,000 cancer patients.

“There are many people here dying silent deaths,” says Jamie McGoldrick.

This is a civil war – but the protagonists are in debt to outside powers. Houthi rebels who toppled Yemen’s president last year are allied to Shia Iran. Sunni Saudi Arabia, which leads a regional coalition supported by the US and UK, deploys jet fighters and troops against the Houthis.

Both sides have been accused of war crimes. But when the UN listed countries that maim and kill children in war, the Saudis were controversially included – before being deleted amid claims of pressure being brought to bear on the UN.

9.30pm Tuesday August 23 on ABC.

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