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ADEN, Yemen – Tarek al-Salami, age 7, sat in a diaper, looking weak. Normally, the malnutrition and diarrhea that weakened his small frame would be treated within a few days, but nothing is normal in Yemen anymore.
Tarek’s father carried him on foot from the southwestern city of Mokha when Iran-backed rebels struck this month, sparking a return to civil war. The boy reached a hospital two days later in the government-held city of Aden, 270 kilometers (170 miles) away but it said it had no beds. Like others, it was overwhelmed by the wounded. They finally found a therapeutic feeding center.
The boy arrived in an “acute crisis” after the delay in care, according to the center’s director, Dr. Arwa Atef, and he only started walking again on Wednesday, over a week later.
“I swear to God, when I look at him, my heart breaks,” said his father, Mohammed al-Salami. “He looks almost lifeless.”
This is how the already fragile health system collapses in the Arab world’s poorest nation, caught in a new front of the Iran war. The Associated Press spoke with patients, medical workers and aid groups in Yemen as medicine is in short supply and some workers are fleeing. Some facilities were taken over by the fighting.
Some health centers are turning away pregnant women and others in need to focus on trauma patients. Vulnerable children fill incubators and share beds. Millions of people are affected by the fighting, supported by two of the biggest powers of the Middle East, as the Iran-backed Houthis against the government forces supported by Saudi Arabia. Over 130,000 have fled their homes.
The feeding center where Tarek and other children are recuperating is struggling with an increase in patients in a country where many were already hungry, Atef said.
“We can’t keep up with the situation,” she said.
Overwhelmed hospitals concentrate on the injured
Most hospitals and primary health centers affected by the escalation in fighting are closed for the first 48 hours before services are restored, the United Nations said. But the Houthis have seized the Red Sea coast, including key ports for aid.
“The areas with some of the highest health needs are increasingly difficult to reach,” the World Health Organization said on Friday.
