Yemen's humanitarian and human rights catastrophe continues to worsen, according to new UN figures which put the number of killed since late March at more than 5,700.
Speaking to reporters in Cairo by video conference, the UN's humanitarian coordinator for Yemen Johannes Van Der Klauww said that 830 of the dead were women and children. UN officials had earlier put the total number of civilians killed at more than 2,600.
As the death toll in the conflict pitting Saudi-led coalition forces against Shia Houthi rebels and their allies continues to rise, humanitarian conditions have only grown more dire, said the coordinator. 21.2 million people in the country - 82 percent of its entire population - are in need of some sort of humanitarian assistance.
"We currently estimate that over 14 million people lack sufficient access to healthcare," said Van Der Klauww. "3 million children and pregnant or lactating women require malnutrition treatment or preventative services and 1.8 million children have been out of school since mid-March."
320,000 children, he added, were acutely malnourished.
The UN's special envoy for Yemen, Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, has announced that peace talks will take place in the coming weeks, but observers of Yemeni affairs regard the talks with skepticism. Meanwhile, fighting continues to rage, with neither side able to make a decisive breakthrough.
Comment: "For all of our advancement in self-governance, the rule of law, and the betterment of people's lives, the world stands in crisis. Our actions toward evil, twisted brands of militant Islamic jihadism in the coming months will determine how humanity navigates the coming century."
Russell also goes on to say: "The most humane thing we can do to end suffering of hundreds of thousands of people is to cripple what ISIS draws its strength from. Destroy their infrastructure. Hammer their electricity capacity. Drop their transmission lines. Eliminate their cell towers where they draw their communications capacity. Destroy the bridges on their roads of ingress and egress. Hammer their oil refining installations they possess and fund themselves with. We have the ability to rebuild them later, but ISIS would be diminished financially by their loss. Put a different way, the most humane thing we can do to protect civilians is to disrupt ISIS' immediate ability to advance and recruit. If the U.S. leads, others will stand shoulder to shoulder. We need our President to be that man."
FYI: Lady Liberty is already fractured. Does he even know where ISIS originated?