News - Yemen: The Minister of Foreign Affairs expressed the condolences of the Government of National Salvation to the Moroccan people and the family of the boy who was trapped in a well in northern Moroccan for five days and died before rescuers were able to reach him.

“At a time when the Yemeni people interacted with the incident of Rayan, and deeply regretted his death, it reminds the Arab peoples and the peoples of the world of the painful reality of the suffering of millions of Yemeni children,” Saba News Agency quoted Hisham Sharaf as saying. “Those children and their families live under an absolute siege, are exposed to a brutal war and are deprived of the most basic rights of the child in the modern era.”

Sharaf stressed that the lives of Yemeni children have become meaningless to advocates of childhood rights and the international community as a whole. 

“Yemeni children have been deprived, and are still, of their most basic rights, and hundreds of thousands of them are suffering greatly as a result of the US-Saudi-Emirati aggression and siege,” he added. “A large number of them die in full view of the whole world, due to the deterioration of the capabilities of the national health system, and the continued closure of Sana’a Airport.”

Minister Sharaf pointed out that for seven years, Yemeni children are risking their lives every day when they go to schools, due to the ongoing direct targeting of schools and buses by the aggression. Hundreds of thousands of them have been deprived of the ability to go to schools, due to the living conditions of their families, and the continued scarcity, and even the absence of oil, due to the detention of fuel ships.

"The ongoing aggression carried out by the governments of Saudi Arabia and the UAE against the Yemeni people is a dangerous transgression that history will not forget. It will be a black point in the history of relations between Yemen, Saudi Arabia and the UAE,” he added.

The Minister of Foreign Affairs reiterated the necessity of ending the aggression, stopping all military operations in the Yemeni territories, lifting the siege, and opening air, land and sea ports, foremost of which is Sana’a International Airport, for civil and commercial flights.

Rayan, aged five, fell into the well at his village of Ighran in the hills near Chefchaouen on Tuesday, triggering a huge rescue effort that engrossed the country.

Footage posted on social media showed the scene after his body was recovered, with hundreds of distraught rescue workers and onlookers gathered at the site chanting to god and shining the flashlights of their phones into the air.

Moroccan and international media, stationed near the well in which Rayan Awram, aged five, fell, were waiting for a glimmer of hope.

A number of local, Arab and international personalities from various fields were interested in Rayan's story, declaring their solidarity on social media platforms, which convey everything small and large about the rescue operations.

Caring for the child Rayan went beyond the limits, and made everyone closely follow the details of his rescue operations. Athletes, artists, intellectuals and academics showed solidarity with the child.

The children of Yemen who are under aggression for more than seven years, were not taken care of by a media outlet, or a celebrity followed their news, although there are at the bottom of this well, the corpses of more than ten thousand Yemeni children, their bodies torn by Saudi and UAE missiles.

A Yemeni child under the age of five dies inside this well, like the age of the Moroccan child Rayan, every nine minutes. Also, inside the Saudi-Emirati well, 3,000 Yemeni children with cancer are at risk of death.

Four out of five Yemeni children need humanitarian assistance, which is more than 11 million children. 400,000 children suffer from acute malnutrition, and more than two million children are out of school. Another four million are at risk of getting out.

It is notable that these figures, which are all documented and issued by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and the United Nations Development Program, include only child victims whose situation international organizations have been able to find out, while there are countless other children.