After more than a decade of war, millions in Yemen are struggling to survive as aid funding dries up, public services fail and rival powers compete for influence, in a country the United Nations says is "hanging by a thread".
Photos taken at a displacement camp near Taez in south-west Yemen show a woman boiling leaves to feed her grandchildren. The images, released by French news agency AFP last week, capture the reality faced by millions of Yemenis, but received little international attention.
The United Nations has warned the country is edging closer to collapse.
"After a decade of conflict, Yemen's people are hanging by a thread, and that thread is fraying," Edem Wosornu, director of crisis response at the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, warned in mid-April.
The UN warning reflects a reality that humanitarian organisations have watched unfold for years, said Louis-Nicolas Jandeaux, humanitarian advocacy and development finance manager at Oxfam, which has worked in Yemen since 1983.
Yemen is the poorest country in the Arab world and among the poorest anywhere on the planet – as it was prior to the civil war, which began in 2014.
Shrinking funds
The war between Iran-backed Houthi rebels and the internationally recognised government, supported by a Saudi-led coalition, has caused more than 377,000 direct and indirect deaths and displaced more than 4.5 million people.
More than half of Yemen's population of 40 million now needs humanitarian assistance. Some 2.2 million children under five suffer from acute malnutrition and nearly 19 million people cannot access healthcare. Even people who have not been displaced increasingly need help.
The UN says Yemen's 2025 humanitarian response plan has received only 25 percent of the funding it needs – making Yemen's crisis one of the three most underfunded in the world.
"The biggest recent shock has come from cuts to humanitarian aid over recent years, including cuts to USAID," Jandeaux told RFI. "We are also seeing cuts to development aid from the world's [other] wealthiest countries."
While humanitarian aid alone cannot solve Yemen's problems, experts say it could help limit the damage and prevent the crisis from worsening.
"We are already trapped in a vicious cycle, but the goal is to stop it spreading further. There is growing disinterest in this 'forgotten crisis' because it is a country facing a prolonged emergency, with one crisis piled on top of another: security problems, water shortages, floods, drought and more," Jandeaux added.
Aid agencies have been forced to reduce food assistance, healthcare services and protection programmes. Meanwhile, 73 UN staff members remain arbitrarily detained by the Houthis, who control northern Yemen.
"The crisis in Yemen receives very little media attention and is rarely at the centre of diplomatic discussions, even though it is hit by every possible shock imaginable," Jandeaux said.
Neither war nor peace
Large-scale fighting has decreased since a UN-brokered truce in 2022, but clashes have never fully stopped and blockades remain in place. The country has entered a state of neither war nor peace.
Daily life remains difficult for many Yemenis. Oxfam says public-sector salaries are often delayed for months, partially paid or suspended altogether, while inflation and currency depreciation have sharply reduced their value.
Yemen's economy remains under severe strain, with rising inflation and growing hardship across the country, according to the World Bank.
Conflict across the Middle East has also pushed up fuel and food prices. Yemen relies on imports for 90 percent of its food, and rising wheat and food prices linked to the war in Ukraine hit the country hard in 2022.
United States strikes in March 2025 and Israeli attacks last summer have also had a significant impact on civilians.
"More and more communities are now going without basic necessities, and we are seeing diseases return in places where they had previously been eradicated," Jandeaux said.
The country's government is increasingly unable to perform basic functions, said Quentin Müller, a journalist who specialises in Yemen. "People need public services. They need a state. But the state has failed and is absent."
Recent Houthi attacks on government-held ports have also damaged one of the government's last sources of income and it now has almost no revenue left.
Saudi Arabia dominates
No comprehensive peace agreement has been reached since 2022, and Yemen remains an arena for competing over influence between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Rather than uniting against the Houthis, rival forces in the east and south have spent years divided and fighting each other, depending on whether they are aligned with Riyadh or Abu Dhabi.
"People no longer know who governs them," one Yemeni woman told the news website Muwatin in June 2025. "What matters to us is electricity, water and jobs, rather than slogans promising 'liberation' or being subjected to foreign agendas."
Since the start of the year, Saudi Arabia has emerged as the dominant power in parts of Yemen outside Houthi control. A new government based in Aden was sworn in from Saudi Arabia in February.
"Riyadh's approach now reflects a power that has learned, slowly and at great cost, the limits of using force in Yemen," Afrah Nasser, a former member of the office of the UN special envoy to Yemen, wrote for the French Middle East affairs website Orient XXI.
The shift has frustrated the UAE, whose influence was exercised through the Southern Transitional Council, an organisation Saudi Arabia dissolved earlier this year.
A 'leaking pipe'
Although little has changed on the ground, Saudi officials have promoted what the pan-Arab newspaper Asharq al-Awsat described in February as a "new era".
It would be built on "transparency, anti-corruption measures" and "integrity and sustainability" in the service of "growth and prosperity".
Saudi Arabia has reportedly announced more than €400 million in investments. On Wednesday, a Saudi source told Reuters that the kingdom would provide $150 million worth of fuel products to Yemen to keep power stations supplied with diesel and fuel oil until the end of 2026.
Demand for electricity has reached its highest level because of extremely high summer temperatures.
Saudi Arabia has also reshaped the security apparatus, removing figures considered close to Abu Dhabi and replacing them with loyalists, often Salafists.
"They have installed trusted men, loyal to Riyadh," Müller said. "Some $90 million has been added to the budget to pay these newcomers' salaries because [people] have to be attracted to these positions.
"But none of this is sustainable. The fact that one country is paying another country's budget is highly unusual. And the Saudis do not want to spend billions and billions because they know Yemen is a leaking pipe."
Reunification appears increasingly distant, as Saudi Arabia now treats Houthi control of the north as a political reality.
"We are not yet at the point where the Saudis will sign a peace agreement with the Houthis," Müller said. "But in the medium to long term, that could potentially happen."
Any such agreement would likely be difficult and costly, he added, because the Houthis are demanding billions in compensation from Saudi Arabia.
This story was adapted from the original version in French by Anne Bernas.
