Forgotten Abs: Hunger as a Witness to the Failure of Politics and Humanitarianism

Ma’alat Media – Investigations:
Just a few miles from negotiation halls and United Nations conference platforms, thousands of Yemenis in displacement camps in Abs District, northwestern Yemen, are living through one of the harshest forms of humanitarian exposure in a country exhausted by war, where tragedy has stretched so long that it has become part of daily life. What is happening there cannot be treated as a humanitarian crisis managed through periodic reports and ready-made statements. It is a new chapter in a pattern of compounded neglect affecting millions of Yemenis at a time when more than 22 million people urgently need humanitarian assistance.

This report draws its initial field material from what investigative journalist Issa Al-Rajhi observed and documented through his official Facebook page. On May 12, 2026, Al-Rajhi published a visual report from inside the displacement camps of Abs District, reflecting direct suffering that cannot be softened or beautified. His field testimonies converge with indicators and figures reported by United Nations agencies and international organizations, together forming a fuller picture of a humanitarian disaster that exceeds description and confronts all actors with the question of responsibility.

Abs is not merely a geographical point on Yemen’s conflict map. It is the second-largest concentration of internally displaced persons in the country, after tens of thousands fled the inferno of fighting in Haradh and northern Hajjah Governorate. Today, they live in more than 140 informal camps, collectively hosting over 220,000 displaced people, at least 80 percent of whom are women and children. Behind these figures are faces worn down by hunger, bodies weakened by illness, and families left with little more than the hope that aid may arrive, or may not.

What Al-Rajhi documented inside the camps reveals a reality where torn tents, empty stomachs, absent medicine, and unsafe water intersect. He describes dilapidated tents, fragile shelters at risk of collapse, and entire families debilitated by hunger, living without sufficient food, medicine, or clean water. At the heart of this painful image, the sick and elderly face a slow death, not only because hope is absent, but because they cannot access even the most basic forms of care. The scene becomes darker when these testimonies are placed alongside broader figures showing that 18.3 million Yemenis face acute food insecurity, that more than 41,000 people in Abs District alone are standing on the brink of famine, and that UNICEF statistics indicate that half a million children under the age of five in Yemen suffer from severe acute malnutrition.

Among the faces that bring the tragedy closer to the conscience is Abdullah Abdo Mastabani, known as Abu Hashem, a displaced man in his sixties who appeared in Al-Rajhi’s report as a living witness to what hunger can do when a person is left outside the circle of protection. Severe acute malnutrition has exhausted him to the point that he can no longer move or work. He lives with his mentally disabled wife inside a crumbling shelter in the Abs camps. He had previously depended on humanitarian assistance, but the suspension of many organizational interventions has left him to face hunger and illness alone, relying at times on the charity of neighbors who themselves do not have enough.

The tragedy does not stop at individual testimonies. Al-Rajhi documented three deaths within two months in Al-Mahrabah camp in Abs District. Seven-year-old Ashwaq Ali Hassan Muhab died on August 25, 2025, as a direct result of hunger. Days later, an unidentified elderly woman died in the same camp. She was followed in September 2025 by the elderly Ali Abdullah, after a bitter struggle with poverty, illness, and hunger. One month before his death, Al-Rajhi had published a humanitarian appeal accompanied by Ali’s photo, but according to the report, the response did not go beyond a symbolic field visit by United Nations organizations.

The picture deepens further when the testimonies of women inside the camps are examined, as documented by the United Nations Population Fund in field reporting from Abs. Zainab, a mother of six children aged between 9 and 18, has been displaced since 2015 after her husband was killed in an airstrike. She summarizes the tragedy of motherhood when a mother becomes unable to feed her children. She says she sometimes loses hope and feels that death is near, and that she has heard of displaced families dying of hunger. In one of the harshest images of human collapse, she says she sometimes lights a fire not to cook, but to make her children believe that food is coming, so their crying may ease. In the same documentation, Fatima, a widow in her sixties who was displaced from Haradh District in 2015 and suffers from a spinal injury that prevents her from working, says that life in displacement cannot be compared with the life they once had in their homes. There is not enough food, no basic services, and no certainty that tomorrow will be less harsh than today.

In another equally tragic context, the testimony of Nasser, reported by the International Organization for Migration in May 2026, reveals the other face of the catastrophe, where war overlaps with climate shocks, poverty, and the collapse of shelter. Nasser, a 57-year-old displaced man in Wadi Nakhla near Hajjah, found himself facing sudden floods that struck his area in May 2026. He lost his young son, who slipped from his hands in the darkness as the family tried to flee, while the floodwaters swept away his home and livestock in a single night. His case was not isolated. More than 900 displaced families in Abs District had lost their shelters to floods before May 2026, in a scene that shows how a natural disaster can turn into a compounded tragedy when it strikes land already exhausted by war and displacement.

These field realities come at a moment of severe collapse in international humanitarian funding. In January 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump issued an executive order suspending all U.S. foreign assistance, a step Amnesty International described as a sudden and irresponsible cut with catastrophic consequences. By the end of 2025, this trajectory had developed into Yemen’s complete exclusion from the list of recipients of U.S. assistance, triggering a chain of successive collapses in the humanitarian response system. In January 2026, the World Food Programme announced the termination of all its operations in areas under the authority of Sana’a, areas that represent nearly 70 percent of total humanitarian needs. Alongside this withdrawal and decline, 453 health facilities across Yemen’s 22 governorates partially or fully closed their doors. Meanwhile, total available funding in 2026 stood at around $280 million, while the World Food Programme alone requires $802.3 million.

This is where Al-Rajhi’s appeal to humanitarian organizations operating in Yemen gains its direct moral meaning. He is not asking for another protocol visit or a report that will be written and forgotten. He is calling for urgent intervention to provide food, medicine, clean water, and dignified shelter. Yet this demand collides with a highly complex security and political reality. In February 2025, the United Nations Secretary-General issued a decision to suspend all UN agency operations following the detention of 24 UN staff members. In October of the same year, armed elements stormed the offices of three major international organizations in Hajjah city, namely Oxfam, the Norwegian Refugee Council, and the Danish Refugee Council, confiscating vital equipment. Within this environment, the World Food Programme has so far been able to reach only 2,000 families out of 4,000 targeted families in Abs.

In this context, it cannot be overlooked that any de facto authority, including the Sana’a authorities, has in principle a legitimate right to take measures it deems necessary to protect public security and prevent activities that may violate the country’s sovereignty or threaten its safety, provided such measures are based on a clear and transparent legal process that guarantees the right of defense and independent verification of accusations. From this standpoint, the Sana’a authorities justify the detention of some workers from international and UN organizations by citing security concerns related to espionage, infiltration, and the use of humanitarian cover for non-humanitarian purposes.

However, international organizations and the United Nations deny these accusations. They affirm that their staff operate within neutral humanitarian mandates, and that targeting humanitarian workers or restricting their movement directly undermines the ability of organizations to deliver food, medicine, water, and shelter to those in need. Between the account of the Sana’a authorities, which rests on security considerations, and the account of humanitarian organizations, which upholds the humanitarian and neutral nature of their work, civilians in the Abs camps remain the weakest party in this harsh equation. Hunger does not wait for investigations to be completed. Disease does not stop at the boundaries of political dispute. Malnutrition strikes children, women, and the elderly before any settlement or guarantee reaches them.

For this reason, the fairest path does not lie in denying security concerns, nor in ignoring the organizations’ denials. It lies in establishing a transparent and independent legal mechanism that guarantees the right of the Sana’a authorities to protect security while also preserving the safety of humanitarian workers, the neutrality of relief work, and the continuity of aid delivery to those who deserve it. The real dilemma is not only the multiplicity of narratives, but the fact that victims of hunger, disease, and malnutrition pay the price of any disruption, suspicion, or administrative and security conflict before anyone else.

Yet blaming organizations alone for the crisis would be an oversimplification of a deeper truth. The tragedy of Abs stands at the intersection of deadly pathways: the collapse of international funding, restrictions on humanitarian work, the continuing effects of war and blockade, and the faltering political process. Yemen imports between 80 and 90 percent of its food, medicine, and fuel needs. For years, the military coalition led by Saudi Arabia imposed restrictions on sea and air entry points, cumulatively affecting the country’s ability to import. The 2019 report of the UN Group of Eminent Experts documented strikes on vital civilian infrastructure and stated that there were reasonable grounds to believe that the blockade and the starvation of civilians had been used as tools of war. Human Rights Watch described the blockade as amounting to collective punishment against millions of Yemenis, while Foreign Policy stated that the Saudi blockade had turned Yemen into an economic and humanitarian disaster zone. By 2025, the war had claimed the lives of approximately 377,000 Yemenis through direct and indirect causes.

Between the pressure of the blockade, declining funding, and the shrinking ability of organizations to access communities and respond, the political roadmap remains stalled, and the state of no-war and no-peace continues, a condition Al-Rajhi identified as one of the deeper causes behind the worsening suffering of people. Yemen’s humanitarian crisis is no longer shaped by military dynamics alone. It is increasingly shaped by funding collapse, service reductions, and the erosion of humanitarian institutions’ ability to reach people and respond. For this reason, the United Nations warned in May 2026 of an unprecedented widening of the funding gap for Yemen’s humanitarian response plan, at a time when needs are multiplying and resources are diminishing.

In this sense, Abs does not appear merely as an overcrowded displacement area. It is an exposed mirror of multi-layered failure: the failure of politics to stop the war, the failure of funding to protect the minimum conditions of life, the failure of security and legal guarantees to separate legitimate concerns from the protection of humanitarian work, and the failure of the world to turn concern into action. Across all these levels, displaced people in tents remain the weakest link. They have no ability to influence decisions on war, funding, security, or negotiation, yet they pay the full price with their bodies, their children, and their dignity.

At the close of this scene, Al-Rajhi issues a dual appeal: a humanitarian appeal to organizations for immediate intervention, and a political appeal for action through every possible means to pressure for the restoration of the Yemeni people’s rights and an end to a reality whose price is paid by the poor and displaced alone. What is needed today, before any new statement, is immediate humanitarian intervention that provides food, medicine, clean water, and adequate shelter for the displaced people of Abs and Hajjah. This must be accompanied by documented guarantees and strict international monitoring to ensure that relief reaches those entitled to it without political manipulation, extortion, or obstruction.

At the strategic level, there is no real exit from this catastrophe without coordinated international pressure that compels all Yemeni parties to translate the roadmap into tangible reality and restores to the displaced their right to life, return, and dignity. Abs today is not a cluster of forgotten camps on the margins of war. It is an open test of the conscience of politics and the humanitarian system alike. When hunger becomes part of the daily lives of children, women, and the elderly, and when disease and malnutrition become a fate haunting the weakest groups, silence is no longer a neutral position. It becomes a heavy witness to the failure of a world that sees the tragedy and does not stop it. As Issa Al-Rajhi said from inside the Abs camps in May 2026: “Here, people die slowly, while the world watches.”