NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) – The United Nations says Ethiopia’s Tigray region is in a ‘critical situation’ under ‘very critical malnutrition’ as vast rural areas to which many people have fled during three months of fighting reach beyond aid.
The UN humanitarian agency also said in a new report that Ethiopian army continues to occupy a hospital in the city of Abi Adi, which “prevents up to 500,000 people from accessing health services” in a region where the health system is largely in collapsed under looting and artillery fire.
The alarm is mounting over the fate of the approximately 6 million people in the Tigray region, as fighting is reportedly as fierce as ever between Ethiopian and allied forces and those supporting the now fleeing Tigray leaders who once ruled the Ethiopian government. dominated.
“The needs are great, but we can not pretend not to see or hear what is unfolding,” Ethiopian President Sahle-Work Zewde said in a statement on Friday after visiting the capital, Tigray, Mekele. visited.
In one of Ethiopia’s most outspoken comments to date, she noted that “there are still major delays in reaching people in need.”
Ethiopia said on Friday that humanitarian aid had reached 2.7 million people in Tigray. But the UN report calls the current response ‘drastically inadequate’, even as progress is made.
With about 80% of the population according to the Ethiopian Red Cross earlier this month, fears are growing that more people are starving to boredom.
“The next few weeks are crucial to prevent famine,” the German Foreign Ministry said in a brief statement last week after reporting on a visit by a European Union delegate to Ethiopia.
The new UN report released on Friday states that even in areas that can be reached, a screening of 227 children under the age of 5 showed that they have an astonishingly high level of malnutrition, although this is not the number do not mention cases.
It also says that a study of more than 3,500 children found 109 with severe acute malnutrition. The World Health Organization describes the condition as ‘when someone is extremely thin and at risk of dying’.
“Malnutrition (in Tigray) is expected to deteriorate as households are restricted to fewer meals each day,” the UN report said.
The Tigray conflict started at a vulnerable time, just before the harvest and after months of a local locust. The majority of the population are subsistence farmers.
The UN report cites “bureaucratic obstacles” and the presence of “various armed actors” as complications in the delivery of aid.
Humanitarian workers described how they were trying to navigate through a patchwork quilt of the authorities, including residents of the neighboring Amhara region who had settled in some Tigray communities, as well as soldiers from neighboring Eritrea. of whom witnesses are accused of widespread looting and burning of crops.
The Ethiopian government denies the presence of Eritrean soldiers, although the interim government of the Tigray region has confirmed this, accusing them of looting food aid, according to a recent Voice of America interview.
The UN report describes a ‘dire’ situation in which ‘COVID-19 services stopped’ in the Tigray region, in some cases displaced displaced persons 30 to a single classroom and host communities under ‘incredible tension’.