World Food Programme ramps up response in Yemen as hunger fears escalate, official says

By Antoni Slodkowski UNITED NATIONS, Sept 21 (Reuters) — The acting chief of the World Food Programme on Monday said the agency was ramping up its response to the escalating crisis in Yemen, where Houthi fighters seized the country's Red Sea coast, displacing tens of thousands of people. Nearly 700 people have been killed and thousands injured, according to the UN, as the group made their advance. More than 120,000 Yemenis have fled their homes within Yemen, and thousands more by boat across the Red Sea to Africa. "We are stepping up. We have supported around 60,000 people with hot meals and food commodities and we are building up our pipeline to respond to hundreds of thousands more," WFP Acting Executive Director Carl Skau told Reuters during the United Nations General Assembly in New York. The escalation in Yemen comes as more than 18 million people, roughly half the population, face acute food insecurity and some 2.2 million children under age 5 are acutely malnourished, according to the WFP data. Camps for the displaced are "already overstretched and our operations there are underfunded," Skau said. "People are not eating enough, there is no healthcare, and these are the.