‘We no longer eat three meals’: Yemen’s displaced face daily fight for food 

Mohamed Saed’s children still call him to the table. “Come on, Dad, come eat,” they say. Often, he tells them he is already full, even when he has gone without food.

The 46-year-old teacher has not received a salary in years. Displaced three or four times since Yemen’s war began, he lives with his wife and five children in a single room in Taiz and is more than a year behind on rent.

“We no longer eat three meals,” he told Al Jazeera. “Maybe two meals and sometimes one meal.”

His family was going hungry long before the latest fighting. Now, a new escalation that began in early September has forced nearly 134,000 people from their homes, including an estimated 73,000 children, according to UNICEF, leaving many more families deciding which meals to skip.

Yemen’s shifting front lines

Yemen’s latest round of fighting has redrawn front lines after more than a decade of war, fuelling hunger and displacement.

The country has been effectively divided since the Iran-aligned Houthis seized the capital, Sanaa, in 2014. The Houthis control the north and west, where most Yemenis live, while the internationally recognised government, which is backed by Saudi Arabia, holds most of the south and east.

On September 3, fighting erupted between the Houthis and government forces when the Houthis launched a major offensive west of Taiz.

Within days, Houthi fighters entered Mocha, and they have since taken control of almost all of Yemen’s Red Sea coastline, down to the Bab al-Mandeb strait, a chokepoint for global shipping.

Saudi Arabia has responded with hundreds of air strikes, and the Houthis have launched drone and missile attacks on Saudi territory.

The World Health Organization (WHO) says 838 people have been killed and more than 3,600 injured since early August, when the Houthis began striking government forces.

Most of the toll has come since the ground offensive began on September 3, and in the week to September 26 alone, 164 people were killed. UNICEF has verified that at least 15 children have been killed and 14 injured since September 3, and three more are reported missing.

‘We left everything’

Ruqqaya Saeed is 25 and a mother of eight. She fled Zaghar, in the Maqbanah area west of Taiz where the Houthi offensive began, facing what she describes as rockets, shells and the terror of landmines all at once.

“We left our homes, and we left our livestock, the donkey and the chickens”, she told Al Jazeera from al-Shaqadif camp near Taiz city. “We left everything up to God.”

In the camp, she says, no aid organisation has brought her family food. They survive on what charitable people give them. She borrowed money to buy a tarpaulin for shelter, and rainwater has already soaked through it twice, drenching their clothes.

Her children are sick. “The children have diarrhoea, colds and dysentery. We don’t have water for them, not even clean water,” she says.

Dysentery, an intestinal infection spread by contaminated water and poor sanitation, can be deadly for young children because of dehydration.

“There are no blankets to keep warm,” Saeed says. “We only give them treatment at home with water, salt and sugar.”

There are no toilets in the camp. Women wait until night and walk to the mountainside or somewhere isolated, she says.

Half a nation going hungry

In a country of about 43 million people, more than 18.3 million face acute food insecurity in 2026, according to the UN.

Children are among the hardest hit. Even before the latest fighting, more than 2.2 million children under five were projected to be acutely malnourished this year, more than half a million of them with severe acute malnutrition, the deadliest form, UNICEF’s Louise Wateridge told Al Jazeera.

She warned that the fighting is accelerating a vicious cycle: conflict drives hunger and hunger leaves children more vulnerable to conflict.

In government-controlled areas, nearly five million people, about half, faced crisis levels of hunger or worse between March and May, including 1.4 million in emergency conditions, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), the global standard for measuring hunger.

The IPC projected that the situation would worsen during the June to September lean season, with 5.3 million people facing crisis conditions or worse, including 1.6 million in emergency conditions.

Even after the harvest, it expects 5.4 million to remain at crisis levels or worse from October to December.

A month without a home

Enas Abdullah Abdo, 23, fled Hadhran with her three children on the second day of fighting.

“Every hour, the shelling and clashes on us increased, [and] then when the shells eventually reached the houses, we were forced to leave”, she says. Cars could no longer reach them, so the family set out on foot and walked until they found one.

“When we left, we didn’t take anything”, Abdo says. They left without kitchen supplies, mattresses, blankets or batteries for light.

For the past month, about 15 people from five families, her siblings with their spouses and children, have shared a small, damaged house in al-Nashama. “If it rains, the rain falls on us, on the children and on our clothes”, she says. If they cannot find more space, they may have to return to a camp.

An aid organisation gave the family 270,000 Yemeni riyals (about $170), which they spent on essentials including gas cylinders and a few blankets. They still lack food, bedding and medicine. When the children fall ill, treatment at health centres is often incomplete or costs more than they can pay.

“Sometimes we go to the health centres and we don’t find complete treatment, so we’re forced to go back home and give them regular painkillers”, she says.

The displacement has also interrupted the children’s schooling. Of the five or six children in the wider family who were in school before they fled, only three or four have been able to go back. The others could not bring their school records.

Abdo has already lost a brother to an earlier round of fighting, and both her parents to illness.