ADEN (JNI) — Houthi militants are disrupting aid groups’ preparations to face an anticipated drought that threatens Yemen’s food supplies, humanitarian groups warn.
“El Niño conditions … will devastate crops, water availability, and rural livelihoods,” UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Tom Fletcher told the UN Security Council on Aug. 13. A bad crop year could impose terrible suffering on Yemen, Fletcher explained, where six million people already live in “near-famine” conditions and 60 percent of households report inadequate daily food intake. “I wish I could report a positive shift, but the trajectory of the humanitarian crisis, I’m afraid, remains unchanged.”
Mahmud Qayah, Yemen program director for the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, said Houthi territory has become a no-go zone for most international aid groups. His organization moved its offices out of the Houthi-held capital, Sanaa, after a wave of arrests against NGO workers in 2024. “They were forcibly disappeared simply for providing humanitarian aid,” Qayah told Jusoor. “They are denied legal counsel and held without formal charges.”
The arrests make Houthi territory unsafe for aid workers, Qayah said. “Simply speaking English or working for an international agency makes you a target.”
International NGOs have been divided over how best to respond to the crisis. The UN’s World Food Program (WFP) shut down all operations in Houthi-controlled areas in January, citing Houthi abuses. For now, the UN still operates some of its other agencies in Houthi-controlled areas, even as the Houthis continue to hold 73 UN staff members in prison. Many other international aid groups have halted their activities in Houthi-held areas because of imprisonment of their staff or other Houthi interference, Oxfam noted in a report last March. But a smaller set of groups, including Doctors Without Borders, still try to provide relief, even if it means accepting militants’ impositions.
“Recently, pressures on representatives and staff of international organizations have increased,” Fuad Musid, a reporter for Al-Nida newspaper and a native of Houthi-held Ibb province, told Jusoor. “The abuses have expanded … I think this is because of the weak responses from UN representatives.”
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International organizations operating in Houthi-held areas are allowing themselves to be manipulated by the Houthis, Faysal al-Asali, an Aden-based human rights activist, told Jusoor. “They call [aid workers] spies, but these are false accusations, just a pressure tactic to get more humanitarian aid that the militants can loot.”
“We blame the UN more than we blame the Houthis,” Asali said. “They evacuated the workers from other countries, and left the Yemeni staff in prison.”
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