NEW YORK(RAHNUMA): More than 18 million people in Yemen — over half the country’s population — are acutely hungry, the UN’s top humanitarian official told the Security Council on Tuesday, describing a crisis that is deepening faster than the international community can respond.
During a Security Council meeting on Yemen, Tom Fletcher warned that the share of people unable to meet basic food needs had jumped from half to nearly 60 percent in just one month.
The proportion facing the most extreme deprivation rose from a quarter to nearly a third over the same period. “If nothing changes, hunger will deepen, suffering will grow, more lives will be lost,” he said.
The scale of the crisis is severe across both sides of Yemen’s divided territory. In areas controlled by the UN-recognized government, nearly half the population — around 5 million people — face severe hunger, with more than a quarter in emergency conditions.
In areas controlled by the Houthis, Fletcher said the UN lacks the access needed to fully measure the extent of need, but cautioned that an absence of data should not be confused with an absence of suffering. “Yemenis may be out of sight. They mustn’t be out of mind,” he added.
More than 2.2 million children under the age of 5 are acutely malnourished, and without sustained intervention, many will carry lifelong consequences, he warned.
The hunger emergency is being driven by what he described as a lethal combination of conflict, economic collapse, rising prices, shattered livelihoods and an overstretched health system.
The humanitarian response itself is under severe strain, with the UN’s humanitarian appeal for Yemen less than 15 per cent funded, forcing agencies to scale back operations even in areas they can reach.
“Less access, less presence and less funding mean less food, less medicine and fewer lives reached,” Fletcher said.
Adding to this operational crisis is the ongoing arbitrary detention of 73 UN staff members by the Houthis, a situation Fletcher described as not merely unjust but directly undermining the UN’s capacity to save lives. Many of those detained have been held without contact with their families.
Fletcher called for the immediate and unconditional release of all detained UN and humanitarian personnel; urgent and substantially increased funding for the humanitarian appeal; and renewed international support for a political settlement in Yemen.
“Aid can keep people alive. It can’t give Yemenis the future they deserve,” he said. “Only a political solution — owned by the people of Yemen and supported by this council — can do that.”
