Yemen's Forgotten War: Famine as a Weapon

Since 2015, Yemen has endured one of the world's most devastating humanitarian catastrophes—a war that has killed hundreds of thousands, displaced millions, and pushed entire regions to the edge of famine. Yet outside specialist circles, the conflict remains poorly understood, obscured by competing geopolitical narratives and inconsistent international media coverage. This book examines how hunger became a deliberate instrument of war in Yemen: port blockades restricting food imports, agricultural infrastructure targeted by airstrikes, and aid access systematically obstructed by multiple armed parties. Drawing on UN investigative reports, humanitarian field documentation, journalist testimony, and survivor accounts, it traces how a civil conflict became a proxy war sustained by foreign arms, funding, and political calculation. The narrative refuses to reduce Yemen to statistics. It centers the experiences of families navigating collapsing healthcare systems, aid workers operating under fire, and communities watching centuries-old agricultural traditions destroyed within a single decade. It also interrogates the legal and institutional frameworks—international humanitarian law, UN Security Council dynamics, arms export regulations—that failed to prevent mass civilian harm. A measured, rigorously sourced account of how modern warfare weaponizes basic human needs, and what accountability might look like when the fighting stops.