“One million Yemeni children face severe malnutrition within months as families struggle to pay for food in one of the Arab world’s poorest countries, the U.N. World Food Programme has warned,” Reuters reports. “Political turmoil has pushed Yemen to the brink of a humanitarian crisis and aid agencies estimate half the country’s 24 million people are malnourished,” the news agency adds (Abdullah/al-Ansi, 7/19). According to BBC News, “The U.N. estimates that 267,000 Yemeni children are facing life-threatening levels of malnutrition and that 10 million Yemenis go to bed hungry” (Antelava, 7/19).

The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in a press release said that “60 percent of children under five are chronically malnourished [in Yemen] — a rate second only to Afghanistan, where so far this year, more than 200,000 people have been affected by some 300 natural disasters,” the U.N. News Centre notes. According to the agency, “the number of people needing [humanitarian] assistance had risen from 51 million to 62 million — an increase of more than 20 percent — during the first half of this year” because of food insecurity, conflict, and natural disasters, the news service writes (7/19).