Yemen: what a ceasefire does not fix
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Yemen has been called the forgotten war for so long that the phrase has become part of the forgetting. It gets used, everyone nods, and the coverage does not change.
The numbers for 2026: roughly 22 million people — about half the population — require humanitarian assistance, an increase of 2.8 million on the previous year. Some 18.3 million are acutely food insecure, with the most recent IPC analysis showing districts sliding from crisis into emergency and pockets reaching catastrophic conditions. Those are UN and Human Rights Watch figures.
The direction matters more than the magnitude. It is getting worse, not better, in a conflict most people outside the region believe wound down years ago.
A country that keeps removing its rulers
Yemen’s modern history is a sequence of populations getting rid of whoever governs them.
In 1962 a revolution ended the rule of the Zaydi imamate in the north. In the south, a campaign against British colonial rule in Aden — which Britain had held since 1839 — forced withdrawal in 1967. And in 2011, mass nonviolent protest brought down Ali Abdullah Saleh after thirty-three years in power. Tawakkol Karman, one of the organisers of that movement, received the Nobel Peace Prize the same year.
That third one is worth sitting with. Within living memory Yemenis removed an entrenched president through sustained peaceful protest. It is not a country without a civic tradition. It is a country whose civic tradition was overtaken by armed factions.
What followed
The Houthi movement took Sanaa in 2014. In March 2015 a Saudi-led coalition intervened, with Emirati ground involvement and with arms, targeting support and logistics supplied by the United States and United Kingdom.
Both sides have made civilians the currency of the war. Coalition airstrikes on markets, hospitals and funerals have been documented extensively, as have restrictions on imports into a country that imports most of its food. The Houthi authorities, for their part, detain United Nations and aid workers on espionage accusations — accompanied by a media campaign accusing humanitarian organisations of conspiring against the country — to the point that the World Food Programme terminated operations across the north entirely.
An aid agency withdrawing from a famine zone because it cannot guarantee staff safety from the local authority is not a footnote. It is a direct cause of the hunger figures above.
2026
In July 2026 the war escalated again. Flights from Iran into Houthi-controlled Sanaa were followed by strikes on Sanaa airport, which the Houthis attributed to Saudi Arabia. The Houthis then announced they would target shipping linked to Saudi Arabia, and Saudi Arabia condemned the resulting blockade.
The pattern is familiar and grim: a conflict that periodically appears to be subsiding, and periodically resumes, while the humanitarian baseline deteriorates underneath regardless of which phase it is in.