At least half of the population is hungry. Millions of children are unvaccinated. A measles outbreak is spreading.
The people of Yemen have survived the indignities of a more than decade-long civil war. This past week, many were again running for their lives.
A new round of fighting has erupted between the Houthis, the Iran-backed militia in the north, and the Saudi-backed, internationally recognized government, widening the regional conflict that began early this year with the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran.
More than 46,000 people fled their homes in the past week alone, a U.N. agency estimated on Friday, some with little more than the clothes on their backs.
Al-Megdad Hashem and his family were among them. At first, one night late last week, they stayed home, kept awake by the sound of shelling. Then, the next morning, shells landed near their house, in the fiercely contested province of Taiz, wounding two people, including Mr. Hashem’s nephew.
The only way to get them to a hospital was to load them onto a truck that normally carries construction materials. All told, he said, 34 people piled in, including Mr. Hashem, his wife, their four children and his elderly parents. They had barely enough time to stuff their belongings into one small bag.
“It was difficult to take anything,” he said. “We want the war to stop so that people can return to their homes.”
The civil war had largely settled into a fragile peace in recent years, since a 2022 U.N.-brokered cease-fire effectively partitioned the country between government- and Houthi-held areas. Now, Yemen is again in the throes of full-fledged fighting, aggravating what was already one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
Making matters worse, the U.N. World Food Program is so short of money that it has suspended food aid altogether and reduced its provision of monthly cash assistance to every other month, Carl Skau, the agency’s acting executive director, said in a phone interview on Thursday. He had visited Yemen last week.
Children were not going to school in the camps for displaced people that he visited, he said. Yemenis told him they were selling their belongings to buy food. And at one health clinic, a long line of mothers were waiting to be seen, with malnourished children in their arms. “They were struggling to afford one meal a day,” he said.
Yemen, he said, has been barraged not only by the fighting. The disruption of shipping in the region has also raised food prices in a country that imports most of what it eats. Meanwhile, droughts and floods have damaged Yemen’s farms. “The little they produce inside is turned upside down by the weather,” Mr. Skau said.
Even before the latest surge in violence, an estimated 4.5 million Yemenis were displaced from their homes. Nearly half of the country’s health facilities are not functional. Attacks on aid workers have forced the United Nations to suspend operations in the Houthi-held north.
This week, Houthi forces captured Mokha, a strategic Red Sea port city in Taiz, as well as an island in the waterway, according to two Yemeni officials, giving the militia a foothold in Bab al-Mandab, a major maritime choke point through which oil from Saudi Arabia passes on its way to Asia.
Houthi forces have also attacked Saudi oil facilities, in turn pushing up already rising global oil prices.
The Houthis have frequently accused Saudi Arabia of striking their positions.
On Friday, the broadcaster Al-Masirah, which is controlled by the militia, said that Saudi Arabia had launched two rounds of airstrikes on the port of Mokha. The Saudi government did not respond to a request for comment.
The United Nations said on Thursday that at least 14 civilians were killed in the fighting this past week, including two children.
Last Saturday, in the contested Maqbanah district of Taiz Province, Omar Abdulaziz al-Himyari, 25, fled after hearing shelling nearby. At dawn, he and five family members climbed for two hours by foot to a mountain ridge, their route to the closest road. From there they found a car to the nearest city.
“We left in the clothes we were wearing,” he said. “We couldn’t carry anything because of the situation and the difficult terrain.”
They left behind all of their most valuable belongings, including their cows and goats, their beehives and the grain they had planted in their fields.
For now, Mr. al-Himyari is staying with his brother-in-law and looking for work in the city of Taiz, now crowded with the newly displaced. The prices of flour and rice have shot up at the market. Water must be procured from a tanker, and that too is pricey.
“I honestly don’t know how we will manage our daily needs,” he said.
More than 18 million Yemenis face what the United Nations calls acute food insecurity, with 2.2 million children acutely malnourished.
Disease and medical care also remain pressing concerns. The World Health Organization reported more than 17,600 measles cases in the first seven months of the year. At the main hospital in the government-held city of Marib, maternity and obstetric services have been suspended to make space for trauma care, the W.H.O. said, and dead bodies exceed “available mortuary capacity.”
The crisis is especially dire in the Houthi-held north. United Nations operations have been suspended there since October, when U.N. and other aid workers were detained and U.N. offices were raided by the militia. Seventy-three U.N. staff members remain in Houthi detention, the U.N. relief chief told the Security Council in August.
And although Yemen was once a focus of world aid groups, many major funders of relief, such as the United States, have significantly cut their aid budgets.
Yemen needs $2.2 billion in humanitarian assistance, according to the U.N. relief agency, which said it had received only 20 percent of that.
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