YEMEN — Eighty percent of Yemen’s population, or more than 20 million people, need some form of humanitarian assistance as Arab air strikes and civil war ravage the impoverished country, aid agency UNICEF said this week. 

The figure is up by almost 5 million people since the organization’s latest report this month. 

For more than 11 weeks, an Arab military coalition has been bombing the Houthi militia, the dominant group in Yemen at the moment, in a bid to restore the country’s exiled president to power and support local fighters resisting the Houthi advance in battlefields nationwide.

The alliance’s de facto blockade of Yemen’s air space and ports has cut off supplies of food and fuel to the parched country, where gas-powered pumps providing water for drinking and sanitation now lie mostly inoperable.

“20.4 million people are now estimated to be in need of some form of humanitarian assistance, of whom 9.3 million are children,” Jeremy Hopkins, deputy representative of UNICEF, said from the capital Sanaa.

Even before the conflict, UNICEF said around 10 million people in Yemen needed humanitarian assistance, a product of decades of underdevelopment in the mountainous and barely governed Arabian Peninsula state.