Half of Yemen’s children under 5 are acutely malnourished and more than half a million suffer from potentially fatal food deprivation, the UN said on Wednesday.

The children’s agency UNICEF warned that a decade of conflict had stolen childhoods and left an entire generation fighting to survive, and the humanitarian crisis was escalating.

Malnutrition was “agonizing, life-threatening, and entirely preventable,” the agency’s Yemen representative Peter Hawkins said. “It weakens immune systems, stunts growth, and robs children of their potential. In Yemen, it is not just a health crisis — it is a death sentence for thousands.”

US President Donald Trump imposed a freeze on foreign aid in January and canceled most programs run by the US Agency for International Development. “The issue with the USAID cuts is that they diminished the capacity overall here in Yemen quite extensively,” Hawkins said.

While UNICEF has been able to continue nutritional programmes, he said these needed to be complemented by food and cash assistance for an optimum nutritional crisis response, with those areas now compromised. “And therefore it makes our job much more difficult,” he said.

“Without urgent resources, we cannot sustain even the minimal services we are able to provide in the face of growing needs. Yemen’s children cannot wait another decade.”