News – Yemen: The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) says the civilian death toll in Yemen has almost doubled since the United Nations rights body dissolved its monitoring mechanism in the war-torn country.

Reporting on Thursday, the NRC said 823 civilians were killed or injured in the four months before the end of monitoring, and 1,535 in the four months after the dissolution of the mechanism.

The report added that civilian casualties caused by air raids, a tactic favored by the Saudi-led coalition that has been attacking Yemen for seven straight years, had multiplied by 39 in the same period.

The coalition launched the war in March 2015 to return power in Yemen to the impoverished country’s former Saudi- and United States-allied officials.

The war has killed hundreds of thousands of people and turned the entire Yemen into the scene of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

“Who is responsible for the deaths of these children and families? We will probably never know because there is no longer any independent, international, and impartial monitoring of civilian deaths in Yemen,” the report bemoaned.

The UN Human Rights Council voted to disband its Group of Eminent International and Regional Experts on Yemen in October. The move marked the first time that the body had rejected a draft resolution since it was founded in 2006.

“The removal of this crucial human rights investigative body took us back to unchecked, horrific violations,” the NRC’s country director Erin Hutchinson said in a statement.

Source: Press TV