U.N. is rushing aid to hungerstricken district

CAIRO» The United Nations and individual donors are rushing food to a desperate corner of northern Yemen where starving villagers were found to be living off leaves. Aid officials are searching for ways to ensure aid reaches those in need amid alarm that the country’s hunger crisis is worsening beyond the relief effort’s already strained capabilities.

The aid push was directed at a district called Aslam where The Associated Press recently found some families eating leaves, partially because of local authorities manipulating aid distribution and resisting requests to set up biometric registration for those receiving assistance.

In a sign of the difficulties in tracking Yemen’s nearfamine, conditions appeared to be as bad or worse in a neighboring district, Khayran alMaharraq.

On a recent day, Shouib Sakaf buried his 3yearold daughter, Zaifa, the fifth child known to have died in the district this year from malnutritionrelated illness. Sakaf prayed over a grave marked by piles of stones and tangled, dry branches from the surrounding mountain shrubs.

Zaifa was as old as Yemen’s civil war, waged between rebels known as Houthis and a coalition led by Saudi Arabia. Born in the war’s early days, Zaifa succumbed to the humanitarian crisis it has caused — widespread hunger, the collapse of the economy and the breakdown of the health system. At a local medical facility which did not have enough supplies, her father was told she had to be taken to a hospital further away to treat kidney complications. He had no way to pay for transportation there.

“Death came at 2:30 p.m.,” Sakaf said with a deep sigh. “Then we left.”

U.N. humanitarian chief Mark Lowcock issued a dire warning to the Security Council on Friday, ahead of the world body’s General Assembly, saying, “We are losing the fight against famine” in Yemen.

“We may now be approaching a tipping point, beyond which it will be impossible to prevent massive loss of life as a result of widespread famine across the country,” he said.

Across Yemen, around 2.9 million women and children are acutely malnourished; another 400,000 children are fighting for their lives, in the same condition as Zaifa was. This year, the U.N. and humanitarian groups provided assistance to more than 8 million of the most vulnerable Yemenis who don’t know when their next meal will come. That is a dramatic expansion from 2017, when food was reaching 3 million people a month in the country of nearly 29 million.