UNICEF says child malnutrition is rising in Yemen as fighting disrupts access to clinics

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GENEVA, Switzerland — Acute malnutrition is rising among children in Yemen as fighting cuts families off from clinics, the UN children’s agency said Friday.

More than one in four of nearly 2,900 children screened by UNICEF mobile nutrition teams in recent weeks were acutely malnourished, the agency said. More than 200 of them had severe acute malnutrition.

The screening covered only areas where safe humanitarian access was possible, UNICEF said.

Akhil Iyer, the agency’s country representative in Yemen, gave the figures at a press briefing at the Palais des Nations in Geneva. He spoke by video link from Aden.

Iyer said UNICEF was “very concerned about a very visible increase in acute malnutrition among children”.

“Children across Yemen are yet again at the sharpest end of escalating conflict,” Iyer said at the start of the briefing.

Nearly 130,000 people have been forced from their homes in the past three weeks, including an estimated 71,000 children, according to the agency. Most are displaced within Taiz governorate in the south-west.

Many cannot reach safer areas because of fighting, blocked roads or a lack of transport, Iyer said.

Some families have been displaced as many as six times, he said.

UNICEF said the screening results were a partial picture. Across Yemen, and before the latest fighting, more than 2.2 million children under five were projected to be acutely malnourished this year.

Of those, more than half a million were projected to suffer severe acute malnutrition, which Iyer called “the deadliest form”.

“Conflict drives hunger, and hunger makes children more vulnerable to conflict,” Iyer said.

UNICEF has verified that at least 15 children were killed and 14 injured in Yemen since 3 September, Iyer said. Three more are reported missing.

“Behind every one of those children is a parent living through the unimaginable — grief, fear, or the agony of not knowing,” he said.

Schooling has also been interrupted. In the past weeks 243 schools have closed or suspended classes, affecting more than 137,000 students, the agency said.

UNICEF is expanding its emergency response to reach up to 231,000 people, it said. The work covers mobile health and nutrition teams, safe water, support to health facilities and child protection services.

Iyer said he visited the Al Firdous displacement centre in Aden a day earlier, where he met a four-year-old boy named Taha at a UNICEF-supported mobile clinic.

The boy’s family had fled Mokha District, about 200 kilometres away, Iyer said. They left their home and belongings behind. Taha is being treated for severe acute malnutrition.

Iyer quoted the boy’s mother as saying: “We escaped with nothing. My only fear was that I would lose my son before finding help.”

He also quoted a young mother named Haifa, who fled Yemen’s west coast and now lives in a tent with no income. “Displacement has stripped us of dignity,” she said. Iyer said she lives in extreme heat with no source of income and struggles to obtain food and medicine.

Iyer called on all parties to protect children and civilian infrastructure, uphold international humanitarian law and allow safe and unimpeded humanitarian access.

“We cannot keep asking children to survive what they should never have been exposed to in the first place,” he said.

The account of the briefing was carried by the news agencies Reuters and Anadolu, and by the UN information service in Geneva.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs put the number of Yemenis needing aid at more than 22 million in the humanitarian plan it published in March. It counted 18.3 million people as acutely food insecure.

That plan recorded 516,157 children with severe acute malnutrition and 5.2 million internally displaced people. It sought 2.16 billion dollars to reach 12 million people this year.

The International Organization for Migration put displacement since the start of September at 129,438 people, or 21,573 households, across seven governorates.

A Yemeni government body, the Executive Unit for the Management of Displaced Persons Camps, documented nearly 147,000 people displaced in the first 18 days of the month.

The UN refugee agency said this week that nearly 100,000 more Yemenis could be forced from their homes over the next three months. It put the number already displaced since the start of September at more than 130,000.

UNICEF said on 16 September that renewed hostilities had pushed more than 12 million children deeper into crisis.

OCHA has said aid agencies reached 10.83 million people in Yemen between January and June.

Al Jazeera reported that the Houthis seized the port city of Mocha on 10 September and later took almost the entire Red Sea coast, including several islands. The broadcaster said that gave the group greater control over the Bab al-Mandab strait, the southern entrance to the Red Sea.

The war between the internationally recognised government and the Houthis had been largely frozen under a truce agreed in 2022, Al Jazeera reported. Fighting picked up again this year.

Taiz governorate, where most of the newly displaced are sheltering, lies inland from the Red Sea coast in south-western Yemen.

The briefing was held at the Palais des Nations, the UN’s Geneva headquarters. UNICEF issued its accompanying statement from Aden the same day.

Mokha District, where Taha’s family fled from, sits on Yemen’s Red Sea coast south of Hodeidah.