How hunger is devastating Yemen’s children

Al Jazeera travels to Yemen’s displacement camps to measure the toll of malnutrition on the country’s children.

“My daughter is dying. Save her,” Tahani’s father pleaded, after years of knocking on the doors of officials and aid organisations in the hope they would be able to save his eight-year-old daughter.

The war, which began about 12 years ago, has left more than 22 million people in need of humanitarian assistance and 18.3 million facing acute food shortages. Yet the country has received only a fifth of the $2.2bn it needs to help them this year.

Al Jazeera visualises where malnutrition is severe in Yemen, how aid funding is distributed, and why experts say aid is treating the symptoms rather than the causes.

The search for answers took Al Jazeera to displacement camps, nutrition centres and hospitals.

Children like Jiyad reach nutrition centres only after displacement and poverty have taken their toll. He is not an isolated case. According to ground reports obtained by Al Jazeera, more than 200 malnutrition cases have been documented in Abs over the past three years. In Dhale governorate, Al-Nasr Hospital received 269 acutely malnourished children between January and August 2026.

Almost a quarter of Yemen’s acutely malnourished children, 516,157, have the severe form of the condition.

Yemen’s Ministry of Public Health and Population stated that between January and July 2026 there was an increase in cases of “severe” malnutrition among children under five compared with the same period in 2025.

These local figures do not, on their own, provide a national measure of the prevalence of malnutrition, but they reveal something else that is more important in fieldwork: that cases do not appear in a single centre, and that pressure on nutrition services is distributed across different parts of the country.

Stable cases can be treated and followed up as outpatients under the approved medical protocol.

In al-Sumayya camp in Marib, Dr Muajiba al-Mansouri runs a government nutrition clinic. Over the past year, she told Al Jazeera, it treated 33 children with severe acute malnutrition, 85 with moderate acute malnutrition and 84 mothers.

Lack of food or poor diet, illness, social conditions and feeding problems are all made worse by war, poverty and displacement, she said. The World Food Programme (WFP) supports treatment of moderate cases, while supplies for severe cases come through UNICEF and the governorate health office.