Sitting by her son's hospital bed, Houdaid Masbah looks at her 5-year-old boy's skeletal body and sunken cheeks, helplessness engulfing her like a thick cloud a desperation she shares with many other mothers in Hodeidah.
Even before the war, Hodeidah was one of the poorest cities in Yemen, the Arab world's most impoverished nation. Now, the destruction of the port city's fishing boats and infrastructure by the Saudi-led coalition's airstrikes over the past 18 months of war has deprived the townspeople of their prime livelihood.
The UN estimates that about 100,000 children under the age of five in the city and the surrounding province, also called Hodeidah, are at risk of severe malnutrition.
Life became harder for the people in this Red Sea city after March 2015, when the coalition of nine Arab Sunni countries began bombing Yemen's Shiite Houthi rebels to help the internationally recognized government of President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi return to power. The Houthis had pushed Hadi into self-imposed exile in Saudi Arabia and captured large chunks of the country, including the capital, Sanaa.
The coalition suspected the Houthis were using Hodeidah fishermen to smuggle weapons across the sea from Iran. The airstrikes destroyed most of the wooden boats along with fish storage facilities, markets, roads and bridges leaving the fishermen jobless and fearful after seeing some of their colleagues were killed in the strikes.
As Yemen's conflict dragged on, food prices soared and gasoline ran out.
At Hodeidah's central hospital, the 12-bed unit for children with severe malnutrition has been fully occupied for months. Children reduced to skin and bone cry tearlessly as their mothers watch by their bedsides, unable to help.
Masbah, the mother of 5-year-old Salem Ali Salem, says her boy remembers only hunger.
"From the day I gave birth to him ... till now, we are suffering," said the mother of eight. "He got better for a short period of time and then he relapsed."
AP
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