For the second time in three years, the threat of widespread famine hangs over the war-torn country, where millions are displaced and struggle daily to find food.

By Shuaib Almosawa and Ben Hubbard

AL HARF, Yemen — The mother’s first challenge when her spindly 8-month-old son came down with a fever, diarrhea and vomiting was to get from their poor, isolated village in northern Yemen to the nearest clinic.

After three days of failing to find a ride, she set out on foot, carrying her sick child for two hours to reach the medics who immediately recognized yet another case in Yemen’s spiraling crisis of acute malnutrition.

Even after a week of treatment with enriched formula, the boy, Sharaf Shaitah, lay motionless on a hospital bed, his bones peeking through the skin of his twiggy limbs. Asked if her family had enough to eat, his mother, Iman Murshid, replied, “Sometimes we have enough, sometimes we don’t.”

Six years into a war that has killed hundreds of thousands of people, shattered the country and battered much of its infrastructure, Yemen faces rising rates of hunger that have created pockets of famine that aid groups warn are likely to grow, leaving even more malnourished Yemenis vulnerable to disease and starvation.

The war has led to chronic food shortages in what was already the Arab world’s poorest country. A widespread famine was averted in 2018 only by a large influx of foreign aid. But the threat is greater this time, aid groups say, as the war grinds on, families grow poorer and the coronavirus pandemic has left donor nations more focused on their own people.

“The famine is on a worsening trajectory,” said David Beasley, the executive director of the World Food Program, in an interview after returning recently from Yemen. “Our biggest problem now is lack of money — and the war. Six years of war has completely devastated the people in every respect.”

Nearly half of Yemen’s population, 13.5 million people, are struggling to get enough food, according to the United Nations. That number is expected to rise by nearly three million by the end of June, largely because funding shortfalls have reduced how many people aid agencies can feed.

The United Nations says that 3.6 million Yemenis are already in an “emergency” stage of food shortage, and 16,500 have reached “catastrophe.” It estimates that 400,000 children are at risk of dying of hunger.

“If we don’t get them on full rations soon, I just don’t imagine we won’t have a full-scale famine,” Mr. Beasley said.

Yemen has been on a downward spiral since 2014, when rebels allied with Iran and known as the Houthis seized the country’s northwest, including the capital, Sana, sending the government into exile.

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