Sanaa, Yemen – Hadeel Abdullah, a 23-year-old college student in Sanaa, was in a lecture hall when she suddenly felt faint, and fell to the ground. Her classmates raised her frail body, moved her to the dining hall and gave her water.
After 30 minutes, she felt better and returned home. She often loses consciousness, and that was not the first time.
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Hadeel has been struggling with abdominal pain for one year. Her stomach is sensitive to many types of food and beverages, including chicken, meat, and milk.
She has visited multiple doctors in the Yemeni capital Sanaa and had many medical tests in search of the right diagnosis and the perfect prescription. All her efforts, along with the expenses she endured, have been to no avail.
“I have adhered to the prescribed medications without fail. My body regains strength for a short time, but I fall sick again. This has exhausted my health and my finances,” she said.
Hadeel says she has lost faith in health facilities in Yemen, where the country’s more than decade-long war has taken a heavy toll on the healthcare system. The idea of seeking treatment abroad increasingly occupies her mind.
However, boarding a commercial flight from her city, which has been repeatedly bombed during the war, and is controlled by the Houthi rebels, is not an option at present.
“I am trapped between a deteriorating health sector and travel restrictions,” she told Al Jazeera. “Both have denied me access to the proper treatment.”
Hadeel’s circumstances are not rare. In northern Yemen, thousands of patients endure prolonged agony or die prematurely amid a crippled health sector and the absence of commercial flights.
With this new year, United Nations officials say the health crisis in the country is getting worse amid renewed political and security tensions.
“We’re going to see a major change where the health system is not going to be supported in the way it has been in the past,” Julien Harneis, UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator in Yemen, said on January 19.
Dr Hanan Balkhy, the World Health Organization regional director, indicated last month that the emergency in Yemen receives far less attention but remains just as urgent.
She specifically pointed out the gravity of the health crisis in northern Yemen, warning that the ongoing security situation in the north risks leaving millions without humanitarian assistance, including emergency health services.
Hadeel and thousands of other patients in that region recognise that health facilities are too under-resourced to heal their conditions.
Instead, they wait for a flight from Sanaa International Airport – with other operational airports in the country being too far away, across the mountains and through front lines. Many succumb to their illnesses before they can leave.
Airport deadlock
Israel hit Sanaa International Airport a number of times during the last year, leaving massive damage and destroying seven commercial planes in May. The Israeli operations came as a response to missile and drone assaults launched by the Houthis in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza.
Today, authorities in Sanaa maintain that the airport has been repaired and that it is ready to resume operations. Houthi officials accuse regional and international actors of banning the resumption of flights.
The director of Sanaa International Airport, Khalid al-Shaef, said in December that the “American-Saudi-Emirati aggression alliance” continues imposing a blockade on the airport.
Al-Shaef noted that more than 500,000 Yemeni patients are registered as critical cases in urgent need of immediate travel, describing the ban on the airport as a “war crime not subject to a statute of limitations”.
Tayseer al-Samei, a media officer at the Ministry of Public Health and Population in central Yemen’s Taiz province, told Al Jazeera that thousands of patients in Yemen die while waiting for a flight.
“The patients are denied the right to travel for treatment purposes, which means they are denied the right to life,” al-Samei said.
He indicated that some diseases, such as cancer, are often not treatable in Yemen, which necessitates treatment abroad for those who can afford it.
“In Taiz alone, the health authorities documented 1,967 cases of cancer in 2025, recording a 21 percent increase compared to the previous year,” al-Samei said.
In late December, the Minister of Public Health and Population of the UN-recognised government, Qasim Buhaibeh, revealed that authorities record 30,000 new cancer cases annually in the country.
Al-Samei posed a sobering question: “How many of these patients would have been saved if the airports were operating and medical evacuation were possible?”
High cost of misdiagnosis
A faulty diagnosis or botched operation can turn a patient’s life into a misery. That is what happened to Maram’s 55-year-old father. In June last year, he had a tumour on his face.
He went to a local hospital in Sanaa, and an operation was conducted to remove the tumour.
Maram, 22, and the whole family were optimistic that treatment would be effective. However, the result was not what they expected.
“That wound expanded instead and became cancerous,” said Maram. That forced him to travel for treatment abroad three months ago.
To catch a flight, he had to travel from Sanaa to the southern port city of Aden, under the control of the government. “My father spent 15 hours on a bus to reach Aden Airport. If Sanaa Airport were operational, that would have taken him only 15 minutes to the terminal,” she added.
Suad, a doctor in Sanaa, told Al Jazeera that particular medical appliances in some clinics or hospitals are increasingly outdated. This shortage of modern equipment severely compromises the accuracy of diagnostic tests, particularly for cancer screenings and prenatal care.
She shared a story of a patient who visited her three months ago. The woman, two months pregnant, arrived suffering from nausea, vomiting and abdominal pain.
“Using an ultrasound, I checked the fetal pulse. It was zero. I informed the patient of the fetal demise,” Suad said.
However, the woman was not happy with the news. She went to another clinic and did a second ultrasound. There, the practitioner told her the fetal pulse was weak but still there.
“She clung to that result because she did not want a miscarriage,” said Suad. Two months later, the patient’s body began to swell, and the fetus had to be removed to save the mother’s life.
Suad emphasised that many clinics and health centres need to be equipped with modern medical appliances, which can provide accurate results to spare patients unnecessary suffering.
“This is the shared responsibility of the Yemeni authorities, the private sector, and international humanitarian organisations to ensure that reliable medical testing is accessible to patients,” she said.
Aid cuts claiming lives
Ahmed Yahya has worked as an aid worker with multiple local and foreign humanitarian organisations in rural areas of Yemen’s Hodeidah and Raymah provinces during the war.
The aid offered to the health sector, he told Al Jazeera, has saved lives, improved the personal health of countless people, and kept health facilities functional.
UN reports say more than 450 facilities in Yemen have already closed, and thousands more are at risk of losing funding.
“Medications, medical appliances and health-related training programmes have been among the aid packages humanitarian organisations have provided to different areas of Yemen. Without such health aid, death would have taken many more lives,” Yahya said.
The declining aid is a grave and increasingly visible concern. “Lately, humanitarian organisations have largely reduced their aid programmes in the areas where I have engaged in humanitarian activities.”
He added, “For example, therapeutic nutrition for malnourished children and pregnant and lactating women has decreased over the past year. The reduction seems set to continue this year.”
The UN itself has acknowledged the situation.
On January 19, Harneis, the UN coordinator, said: “For 10 years, the UN and humanitarian organisations were able to improve mortality and improve morbidity … this year, that’s not going to be the case.”
Last month, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) indicated that Yemen’s 2025 Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan is just 25 percent funded.
The funding gap has forced agencies to scale back life-saving services across all sectors, leaving millions of Yemenis on the brink of total health collapse.
The security situation in northern Yemen, where the Houthis govern, presents further challenges.
Authorities in Sanaa have detained 73 UN aid workers since 2021 on accusations of espionage, prompting UN organisations to suspend operations.
The Houthi authorities control northern Yemen, where 70 to 80 percent of the country’s 42 million people live.
This hostile environment forces organisations to stop or scale back their programmes, leaving millions of people in desperate health and living conditions.
“When aid stops flowing, families feel helpless,” Yahya said. “They lose access to life-saving healthcare and vital assistance.”
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